[eropple]

CodeIgniter is still PHP4-friendly. It's not "hot" by any means. CakePHP is still actively developed, but it's pretty miserable. (It's slow, too - so much so that framework devs usually benchmark against it because it's so reliably slower-than-everyone-else.)

If you're going to use PHP, I can't really think of a good reason to use anything other than Symfony2.

[josegonzalez]

They're removing PHP4 compatibility in 2.0, which is being more than actively developed. And it at least gets as much traffic as Symfony does: http://www.google.com/trends?q=symfony%2Ccakephp

As far as not using Symfony 2, I wouldn't use anything not marked as stable in production. That goes for CakePHP as well.