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What is the reason of Phalcon being not able to take off after 2+ years of development

There is 1 book which has 130 pages and it's basically a quick overview of Phalcon, not very much in depth coverage and explanation of what's going on in the code etc.

Then there is one average video tutorial from Jesse Boyle and although some things are nicely explained, many of the basic stuff he has no idea how it works and some things didn't work at all.

And that's pretty much it.

Yes, there are a few benchmarks and blogposts like Laravel vs Phalcon/Best framework 2014... and some tips how to install Phalcon on Ubuntu server etc. However, I don't see any interviews, insights from authors and in general it seems that Phalcon is still not ready for production. The community is pretty small (both here and on Stackoverflow).

Could somebody explain to me why the Phalcon team is not pushing this great framework little more to the public eyes?

I don't get it? Is it because it has still a lot of unresolved issues like hash problem? Or is it something else?

It's been 2 years and still no major take off ;)

Do developers of Phalcon abandon their little Phalcon because of the frustration and problems that have arise?

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Phalcon has very good documentation which is better than many tutorials or cookbooks. I think that Phalcon is destinated for developers which understand MVC pattern and PHP (knowledge other of php framework is very helpful). I learned how phalcon works in less than 2 weeks. After that I started writing application without bigger issues.

I'm using Phalcon on production since October 2013. Currently I'm designing application which will be used by about 500 000 active users (Phalcon+MongoDB).

I agree with your sentence about community. It is still small, but I'm trying to helps others and share my experience on this forum.

The core team are doing very good job but currently are busy with migration Phalcon 1.3 (written in C) to Phalcon 2.0 (written in Zephir). Zephir looks easier to learn and understand than C language. I think after release 2.0 the number of contributors will increase.



37.0k
edited Jul '14

"Phalcon has very good documentation".

I don't think so, especially when compared with CodeIgniter or Symfony.

E.g. they are using {{ content() }} in one example in Volt docs, but nothing about what it is etc. Of course I can guess what it does, but if you use it I would whtink that you write about it something. and there are many other examples like that.

Docs are half-baked.

The documentation is the weakest part of Phalcon. Very hard to find basic info on simple things. And it's hard to look at the code if you don't know C. The examples are full of errors and half-baked stuff.

And I think I am right in most of what I am saying, because of the downvotes. Come on guys, I am telling the truth. The marketing, documentation and promotion of Phalcon is very poor. I hope it gets better, but right now it's still not good.



39.4k
in reply to Flanex
edited Jul '14

Just because you got many downvotes doesn't mean that you are right. It could be that you are wrong - think about that for a change.

Whatever other frameworks do has nothing to do with Phalcon. Phalcon moves at the pace that it does and that is the end of it. We don't have any marketing strategies or big campaigns for many reasons:

  • We are not marketers, we are coders
  • We pay for the servers and all the resources available for the project out of our own pockets. Sure there are some donations and sticker sales but that doesn't coer everything
  • We invest our own free time to the project and are always grateful about contributions.

The documentation is lacking in a lot of places. Comparing the documentation of Phalcon with Symnfony is as if comparing a guy that creates a search engine in his mom's basement in his own free time to Google. Be realistic. Symfony has a ton of developers and support personnel and is a lot older than Phalcon. It is also written in PHP and thus a lot of people are not intimidated by it and contribute more. Oh and yeah, Symfony's documentation is far better than Phalcon's (compared to its speed).

I would suggest this:

Instead of being part of the problem, be part of the solution.

Fork the docs repo and start working on improving the documentation. Create blog posts, tutorials, anything that you thought was difficult for you to understand or figure out.

That way, one day we can all say that we have better docs than Symfony and perhaps at that point we will have more people using it.



37.0k
edited Jul '14

"We pay for the servers and all the resources available for the project out of our own pockets."

But anyway, I agree that I should be the problem solver instead of problem creator. So I will try, but it's frustrating to not be able to get answers to many simple questions.



39.4k

Do you happen to know anyone that gives out servers or VPSs for free? I don't. We used to use the micro instance of Amazon which was free but only for a year. Everything else needs to be paid for.

As for the site that you linked, oddly enough it doesn't take into account the traffic that we get for every release for windows downloads. You will be surprised how much that is.

As for questions and answers, all you have to do is ask here or in irc politely. There are ways to deliver your message without pissing people off, which is what I believe happened with your post and you got a lot of downvotes. You will soon find out that this community is very helpful.

Looking forward to seeing your input.



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12.2k

I have to say that I love Phalcon. I've developed in PHP for quite a few years now and I've tried a number of frameworks and personally I've never felt enthused enough to get to grips with any of them. I probably didn't give them enough time to get over that initial learning curve if I'm honest but with Phalcon that didn't matter. I found it so easy to get started on a project, especially with the Dev Tools, and I now use it for all my PHP work (unless it's something really basic where it's just as quick to roll your own)

I don't pretend to be the greatest developer out there, and yes the documentation is lacking in places, but I've always found an answer to my questions if I've looked hard enough.Even if that means me getting my hands dirty and answering my own questions on these forums.I think it is about those of that are using it to try and help others. I've tried to answer a few questions on here where I can and I subscribe to the tag on Stackoverflow to do the same thing. Communitys are what you make them, and I for one am very grateful for the people that put their time and effort into Phalcon