2017 Survey results

Hello everyone!

Back in March, we asked our community to fill in a short survey, in order to gauge why people are using Phalcon, what we should be doing better etc.

The survey was very brief and consisted of the following questions:

Why did you choose to use Phalcon (main reason but also expand please)? *
Do you use Phalcon in production? (elaborate) *
Comments for the team (optional)
Github username (optional)

We received 103 replies and we thank you all of you that took the time to give us input.

Results

Why did you choose to use Phalcon

90.29% (93/103) responses chose Performance which is one of the main attributes of Phalcon.
61.17% (63/103) also chose Flexibility/Simplicity
3.88% (4/103) chose the Community
2.91% (3/103) stated that they liked it

Clearly the above percentages do not add to 100% because many users chose more than one attribute of Phalcon as the reason they chose it

Do you use Phalcon in production?

79.61% (82/103) replied Yes. There were also a frew “planning to in the future” and of course some “no”.

The above was a welcomed surprise. Survey takers in some cases informed us of their websites, which was awesome to see.

This data makes us redouble our efforts to ensure that our users have a high quality and fast framework that can help them and their applications.

Thank you all!

Comments for the team (optional)

The comments ranged from praise to some complains about the documentation (we are working on it).

A sample is below:

Keep up the good work.

It’s my favorite framework

With Phalcon comes great responsibility :)

View’s file structure needs a bit more documentation. I had to look up on stackoverflow to get the gist of it’s file structure.

Excellent work guys, I love you team

Add full features look like laravel, big project orm important and needed

Keep up the improvement of docs and tutorials

Better documentation

Follow Uncle Bob’s clean code rules .. your class and methods are to damn long! Aside from that though, God bless you and thank you so much for the work you do! :)

They did a great job and I would love to complete what I am learning now and start contributing

Phalcon team is awesome. But i think, developments should be more frequent.

Please, improve documentation…

Great work guys! Everything works like a charm, with Postgres or MySQL, with Nginx or Apache, and the documentation is awesome!

Maybe you need a bigger team, more communication, less open bugs, shared hostings support, easier way to debug for beginners like me …

Currently I am using BoltCMS for a new project (mostly because the backend and documentation is easy for me to use/understand) but I would really love to use a similar project if it was done using Phalcon. Another thing missing is a solid e-commerce platform based on Phalcon (I would gladly pay to use/support something like that)

In my mind you should concentrate on examples where are used good practices, maybe CQRS or other architecture solution. Important thing is multimodule architecutre. In my mind its way to make Phalcon more popular for serious projects. Currently are some issues in this architecture, for example dispatching and security check. Make it php 7.1 compatible :)

Maybe a more Laravel kind of documentation.

Documentation needs some work. A lot of the powerful features of phalcon are not well documented (eg the validation class). Some more extensive examples would be nice too…

I really miss a proper tutorial..and there are like 5 ways to bootstrap your application and all look amateurish and messy

Great work! Please continue to expand PHQL, its great but can be quite limiting in its capabilities sometimes.

Hopefully there’s gonna be updated video tutorials.

Very nice job and a big thank you for your work!

Conclusion

We intend on having these user surveys in regular intervals (say every six months or so) in order to get feedback from our community.

Clearly from this survey two things stand out:

Speed/Performance is very important
The documentation needs a lot of work

We will ensure that speed/performance are number one in our priority list, while keeping the framework feature rich. Indeed our documentation has not been stellar and more importantly not uniformed. Work on this has already started in Q1 where a total revamp of the documentation is scheduled at the end of this quarter (Q2) or earlier if possible.

We are also working on our Q2 goals (new blog post coming shortly) which take the above in consideration.