I have a friend who is a carpenter and he said that it’s cheaper hiring him at $40/hr than hiring someone else at $10/hr. The one charging less will take longer to do the same job and will do it will lesser quality.

Hire a pro and get the job done right. If your only willing to pay peanuts, you’ll just be hiring monkeys.

The latest version of the Joomla CMS made major changes in their code. They are calling it a framework now instead of a CMS, and the software was built using the MVC architecture.

If your writing code that will only display items from a database table, the MySQL or PDO functions in PHP would be sufficient. For an application where your adding, editing, and deleting records, a framework will be a better choice.

Take a look at the Zend Framework and go through one of the tutorials. Its hard to explain the value of something like this without actually using it. Good alternatives are symfony and CakePHP.

I have only ever worked by myself on one project for 2 guys I used to work with and will NEVER do that again. They seemed to think that I would create them an online pharmacy and they would be millionaires overnight not putting a lot of thought into promoting their new online venture and how they would increase their sales – a website is after all a magic application that just sells, right?

I think if you want a good programmer that meets your expectations, you need to consider compensating them properly. I look at a potential employer offering less then $50/hr for my services — the exact same way you look at a contractor charging less then half that — not a hope in hell that I’d apply let alone look at your project specs.

I retract all of this, however, if by “framework” you simply mean a bit of OOP and a rough outline of how you want things to work before you start. If we’re getting into flow charts, however, I daresay it’s actually a hinderance on many a mid-sized project.