PHP-General - Thoughts on a which frameworks are most appropriate for small project with basic requ

I'm starting a small project for a client tomorrow. Due to it's simplicity, In passed times I would be tempted to use a hodge-podge of PEAR packages for a database abstraction layer and other goodies and handwrite a lot of custom code in a fairly unorganized fashion.

For this project, I would like to use it as a showcase for my portfolio, so I'm actually interested in over-doing it a bit, without cutting any corners and setting it up as a true example of scalable, proper application built on an MVC framework. I'm looking at CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, Symphony and Zend Framework. I'm not really looking for which one is better, as I know there's much debate. I'm am concerned with which one might be the most appropriate for the project, and the drawbacks and strengths as they compare to each other. I'm concerned with future upgrades, footprint, learning curve and if I should you template files. As I will be working on this project alone, community support, documentation, and available examples and tutorials are a huge factor to me.

I'm looking for personal opinions, online resources, reading materials, books, blogs and anything that could help me decide which direction I should head in for this project.

Here's a the basic project list of project requirements for the client.

- Ability for user to sign up via account and start a new deal.
- User can go through 4-6 step process to fill up forms and upload documents.
- User can also save in middle of the process and come back to continue where they left off.
- Site admin can review deals and change their status.
- Site admin and user can exchange messages and system will keep log.

I think codeigniter is very light and perfect for you.. Easy to learn and implementation..

If you like to switch bit advance feature framework then YII, Zend, Symfony2 is nice You can develop, Enterprise level applications.

No doubt even same you can develop in CI too but this all framework have an ready made environment.

I am using codeigniter framework for middle level web application development and YII, symfony for advance level of application like Social networking, Portal System etc...

CodeIgniter sounds like the most suitable framework to me.