My group is going to attempt to build a new CMS from scratch, designed to serve the needs of our organization. It should be noted that none of us have any formal programming education, but we've picked up this and that from developing different websites, among others the one our community uses now. We've decided to program the new CMS in PHP, with total MVC seperation. Not wanting to re-invent all the little cogs and wheels needed for such a potentially large project as this, we've been looking into using a PHP framework, and some googling and blog-surfing landed us in a discussion: Zend vs Cake? Anyone have any useful input here? Also, any other tips for embarking on this project would be appreciated. (Except for suggestions for existing CMSes, we know they're out there.) EDIT: It seems I was a bit unclear. None of us are NEW to PHP - in fact, we all have fairly extensive experience from previous projects, including the current solution our community's website runs on which we built ourselves. The decision to not use an existing CMS is a very informed one, so although I appreciate all the good suggestions we really are going to do this ourselves. So. Zend vs Cake?