I may be a little late to the game, but...full disclosure I have about 20 years experience with PHP, I've used Cake (large oil & gas company and large computer manufacturer), CodeIgniter (also at o&g company), and for the past 4-ish years Symfony (3.x) for a smaller HR company (we're now migrating to 4.x and it's pretty painless). None of what I've developed would equate to a small site with little traffic. We're (small dev team) tasked with keeping things current/up to date and Symfony has been the easiest to update relative to the other frameworks (very few bc breaks). With the built in debugger, extensive logging, and well written framework error messages, pinpointing a problem is much easier in Symfony than the other frameworks though that may have changed over time.
It's completely possible to wire your ORM or heavy business logic into a Twig template if you work at it in Symfony - but you shouldn't. Symfony doesn't so much enforce good coding as it encourages it. You can bloat up your controllers with business logic, forms, and all sorts of junk or you can spin your business logic off into services, put your queries in reusable libraries, write a mess of reusable twig filters, and get your controllers down to a scant dozen or so lines of code.
I only have about 2 months of experience with Laravel - just long enough to know it's just too tempting for me to wire things incorrectly "just to test something out". I know I'd be coming back in 6 months to try to fix that little shortcut and it would be pinned in place by 20 other things that grew off of it in the meantime. Laravel to me seemed like it would be a great framework to knock together a quick prototype/proof of concept.
My vote would obviously be for Symfony - it's not really a beast to set up, you can spin up a default Symfony project in a minute or two with composer. In a few more minutes you can have a workable prototype - a few views and matching controllers, some queries/repositories/tables using Doctrine. Symfony 4 with Flex is really nice. I imagine you could say most frameworks are overkill if you're doing simple websites but I'd still use Symfony - if the site starts to grow you've got the ability to bolt on all sorts of stuff, if not, you're good where you are. Look into the Symfony LTS versions - read up on their release processes, backwards compatibility promise, how frequently they release, etc. symfony.com/doc/current/contributi...
Good luck with the decision if you haven't already made one.
I may be a little late to the game, but...full disclosure I have about 20 years experience with PHP, I've used Cake (large oil & gas company and large computer manufacturer), CodeIgniter (also at o&g company), and for the past 4-ish years Symfony (3.x) for a smaller HR company (we're now migrating to 4.x and it's pretty painless). None of what I've developed would equate to a small site with little traffic. We're (small dev team) tasked with keeping things current/up to date and Symfony has been the easiest to update relative to the other frameworks (very few bc breaks). With the built in debugger, extensive logging, and well written framework error messages, pinpointing a problem is much easier in Symfony than the other frameworks though that may have changed over time.
It's completely possible to wire your ORM or heavy business logic into a Twig template if you work at it in Symfony - but you shouldn't. Symfony doesn't so much enforce good coding as it encourages it. You can bloat up your controllers with business logic, forms, and all sorts of junk or you can spin your business logic off into services, put your queries in reusable libraries, write a mess of reusable twig filters, and get your controllers down to a scant dozen or so lines of code.
I only have about 2 months of experience with Laravel - just long enough to know it's just too tempting for me to wire things incorrectly "just to test something out". I know I'd be coming back in 6 months to try to fix that little shortcut and it would be pinned in place by 20 other things that grew off of it in the meantime. Laravel to me seemed like it would be a great framework to knock together a quick prototype/proof of concept.
My vote would obviously be for Symfony - it's not really a beast to set up, you can spin up a default Symfony project in a minute or two with composer. In a few more minutes you can have a workable prototype - a few views and matching controllers, some queries/repositories/tables using Doctrine. Symfony 4 with Flex is really nice. I imagine you could say most frameworks are overkill if you're doing simple websites but I'd still use Symfony - if the site starts to grow you've got the ability to bolt on all sorts of stuff, if not, you're good where you are. Look into the Symfony LTS versions - read up on their release processes, backwards compatibility promise, how frequently they release, etc. symfony.com/doc/current/contributi...
Good luck with the decision if you haven't already made one.
Thank you. This was a very nicely detailed reply. And very much in line with the conclusion I came to as well.