is Laravel framework stable enough for medium size project or should I stick with more stable Yii?
codeigniter, laravel, php, yii
Solution
Laravel 3 is rock solid and used in many many production systems. Laravel 4 is beta but about to be released in a few weeks and many people are also using that in production situations with out any issue what so ever (me included).
I'm not sure what you mean by lack of leadership - Taylor Otwell, the main developer of Laravel is very committed to keeping the software updated and is a very strong figure in the Laravel community. There is also a very active community of individuals who both offer support as well as contribute code to the core framework. So while its true there is only one 'leader', many people can and do contribute in a lot of aspects.
Additionally Laravel 4 uses Composer components for many of its core features, for instance most of the session, routing and core http code are actually Symfony components. Thanks to composer Laravel 4 is in a very strong position to stay current with any future developments.
Problem
I use codeigniter for most of my projects and I love CI, but let's face it, it's a slow-moving framework and it doesn't support the latest features of PHP. I think I've outgrown it. I'm about to start a new medium size project (a CMS) and I would like to use a new framework for that. I didn't want to use Zend or Symfony, so Yii seemed like the best option until I found Laravel, and I liked it very much, especially when I found that it has been inspired by CI, also all the praise on the internet helped too. But what is worries is me that it has three major release in one year and I think version 4 is in beta release right now, and apparently developer team is consist of one guy and I'm not sure about it's future (I know it's open source and available on the Github but lack of leadership is never good). I'm planning to use and support this project for many years to come, I'm going to release many modules for it, it's going to be something like whmcs but for a different market. Should i stick with stable Yii or is Laravel is stable enough? Is it too much work to upgrade Laravel to new version (in case you have already done that)? I want it to be: modern framework mainstream enough to have a decent community (I'm sure if its right to use mainstream here!) Low learning curve