Hi All,

Thanks so much for your great feedback from my last post on screen resolution.

I have been going back and forth with a development team regarding scalability and denormalized databases. We have been having a concurrent user issue with low traffic. After analysis of our code, the company gave me a quote to re-engineer my current site. They suggested that it would be slightly more to re-design the entire site in the 2.0 version at 1024. They took it one step further by saying, "by the way, instead of patching within my present PHP. Your code is practically 4 years old. It is similar to Smarty with inline coding where code and HTML do not separate. It is not documented at all (this is true) We suggest Cake. It would be a smarter alternative. Given that you wil be geographically rubberstamping 18 communities based on the main website, it needs to be solid and clean code. It would almost be more cost-efficient to develop from scratch then it would be to do the whole re-design, strict XHTML and plug in new featureds. In the end, it might cost you more, but it will be more reliable architecture, and other will be able to work collaboratively because it is based on MVC concept."

Although it would cost me less to re-design within the present code, according their estimates, the new code in Cake would be about 800 more.

They did give me the option of working with the present code so they weren't just trying to upsell me. It sounds genuine. I went from a 1500 design upgrade to a new website based on pretty valid arguments, partial reason, partial fear. Got to love this business!

Anyway, I know there are hundreds of different PHP frameworks out there, but is there some validity to what these developers are telling me. I want to grow on a strong platform in PHP... Any thoughts?

Thanks for the insight! I curious to see what ya'll think.