I am about to begin development of a new website and have been doing research on PHP Frameworks. I'm not an advanced PHP developer, but I have been developing web sites and apps (in asp.net) for a few years now.

My website will primarily be AJAX-based (using jQuery) and making lots of calls to web services. After some research, here's what I came up with:

CakePHP: Originally started developing in this, but found it too complex. The fact that it forces you to use and learn all this new stuff just to use it was a bit daunting, so I put it aside for the time being.

Zend: The performance of the framework leaves me a bit skeptical, but I heard it has great support for creating web services. I also heard it was a bit complex.

CodeIgniter: No real reason for not using this one. Based on what I've read CodeIgniter and Yii are very similar, but Yii is a bit faster and doesn't have un-needed code for PHP4 (since I plan on developing exclusively in PHP5).

As far as Yii, the only things that scare me about it are that it is newer than the other frameworks so it has a smaller community. It also doesn't seem to have a ton of web service support (only SOAP, from my understanding) as opposed to Zend.

So my questions come down to:

1. Should these things worry me? (not as big of a community, poor web service support)
2. Is there anything else I should look into?
3. Is my choice of Yii over the other frameworks ok for a primarily AJAX-based web app?

Bara