Symfony 7.2 can work as a micro framework, believe it or not: https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-7-2-simpler-single-f...

They say it "can" but it is not first class in their docs or minds, so it's mostly up to you to figure out how to do most of things then. It would be better to have an independent micro framework with a clear scope of what it can and cannot do compared to the full Symfony stack.

Is FuelPHP or CodeIgniter still going? Those were my two favourites back in the day before Laravel came on the scene.

I don't think Fuel is at all, and CodeIgniter is... but not really?

IMO Laravel is kind of the spiritual successor to CodeIgniter, although of course a lot has changed between V1 and V11

True true. I went back and forth so much in the early days of CodeIgniter, Rails, Fuel and Cake.

Eventually discovered just building stuff was going to bring me the most joy, no matter the tool. It's been a joy learning PHP again though, even if I do suck at it right now.

When you say micro framework, what are you looking for? If you're just looking for a routing library then something like Symfony Flex might be what you want.

I find when I start a project I pretty quickly want to add an ORM, models, and maybe some middleware, and then I'm at a point where I might as well just use Laravel because it's fast enough and I know my way around.

Can't go wrong with Slim: https://www.slimframework.com/

But if you're looking for something more modern and interesting, then Hyperf looks pretty cool. They have a mini-framework version you can check out: https://github.com/hyperf/nano

It does require Swoole, but that is a lot easier to get your hands on these days