What is the best php framework?

I have found cake to be the most portable and easy to install. If I had to choose a MVC PHP framework I would go with Cake.

That depends on your needs. I believe Cake heavily focuses on rapid application development.

You might also want to go with a loosely coupled framework, i.e. one that you can pick the parts you need from. I’ve grown considerably fond of the Zend Framework, but that depends on at least PHP version 5.2.1 (or something like that). If you want PHP 4 support, you might want to look at CodeIgniter. ezComponents is also loosely coupled I believe.

Or you could go for all three: since they’re loosely coupled, you can pick the best parts from all.
(Oh, there’s also Solar, which, I believe, is also loosely coupled, though not that expansive)

Then there’s Symfony, I believe it also focuses on rapid application development and it is supposed to have good command line tools.

I suppose I’ve had all I’ve heard of by now, if I think of more I’ll post it. The best thing is to do some research to each to find out which best suits your needs, but as you’ve probably noticed, I’m a big fan of the loosely coupled ones, especially ZF, which has an excellent MVC architecture.