Why do I need to use a popular framework?

Question

I\'ve been a PHP developer for many years now, with many tools under my belt; tools that I\'ve either developed myself, or free-to-use solutions that I have learned to trust

Answer 1

Any experienced developer can build a framework -- the challenging part is convincing others that it's worth using. You'll need to create documentation and tutorials for it for those who plan to use or maintain it. You'll probably need to create a demo site to prove that its useful and actually works like it's supposed to.

That alone can be a considerable investment, not including bugs that could pop up in between. When its all said it done, it could be worth spending time learning another framework instead of making your own.

You mentioned CodeIgniter -- I personally feel like that's a pretty framework -- it doesn't get much more barebones than that.