Frameworks seem to be most useful for churning out a lot of mediocre websites quickly. If you're doing something really original, a framework is less useful.
Another downside of frameworks is maintenance. A company hires an outsourcing company to make a website. They use a framework, and might not even use it correctly. The incentive is for the outsourcing company to use a framework, because that lets them ship a website that sort of mostly works quickly, so they can get paid.
The contract is over and now some other programmer (such as me) is now supporting it. Now, making changes is several of order of magnitudes harder, because you're fighting the framework in addition to the code that was already written (especially when they didn't use the framework correctly).
For example, I was working on a website that used Zend forms. Now I needed to modify the form so that it was pre-populated with the data (an edit page instead of a submit page). I spent a couple days looking at the code and the zend documentation, and I just couldn't figure it out. The form had some javascript on it also, so I couldn't just use value="" to pre-populate the data.
It it was plain HTML/PHP, I could have just used value="" to pre-populate the data and be done in 5 minutes. The framework make a 5 minute task almost impossible.
Another downside of frameworks is maintenance. A company hires an outsourcing company to make a website. They use a framework, and might not even use it correctly. The incentive is for the outsourcing company to use a framework, because that lets them ship a website that sort of mostly works quickly, so they can get paid.
The contract is over and now some other programmer (such as me) is now supporting it. Now, making changes is several of order of magnitudes harder, because you're fighting the framework in addition to the code that was already written (especially when they didn't use the framework correctly).
For example, I was working on a website that used Zend forms. Now I needed to modify the form so that it was pre-populated with the data (an edit page instead of a submit page). I spent a couple days looking at the code and the zend documentation, and I just couldn't figure it out. The form had some javascript on it also, so I couldn't just use value="" to pre-populate the data.
It it was plain HTML/PHP, I could have just used value="" to pre-populate the data and be done in 5 minutes. The framework make a 5 minute task almost impossible.