A - The Stack Cheat Sheet
One page, use case on the left, recommended pick on the right. A $ marks anything that isn’t open source. Where two picks appear, the first is usually the faster start.
| You need to ship… | Reach for | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| A custom application with real business logic | Laravel or Symfony | Ch. 1 |
| A marketing site or blog a client edits themselves | WordPress | Ch. 3 |
| A large, multi-department, multilingual institutional site | TYPO3 | Ch. 3 / Ch. 13 |
| A one-off script or CLI tool, no framework | Symfony/Console, Guzzle, Monolog | Ch. 2 |
| Login, sign-up, password reset | Laravel Breeze/Fortify, Symfony Security, or WordPress roles | Ch. 4 |
| An internal admin panel | Laravel Filament, Symfony EasyAdmin, or Nova $ | Ch. 5 |
| A REST/GraphQL API with docs | API Platform | Ch. 6 |
| Live updates without a page refresh | Laravel Reverb, Symfony Mercure, or Pusher $ | Ch. 7 |
| File sharing and sync (“our own Dropbox”) | Nextcloud | Ch. 8 |
| Ordinary file uploads in an existing app | Laravel Storage / League/Flysystem | Ch. 8 |
| A product catalog and checkout | WooCommerce, Sylius, or Cashier + Stripe $ | Ch. 9 |
| Search that tolerates typos and ranks by relevance | Laravel Scout + Meilisearch (or Algolia $) | Ch. 10 |
| Background jobs and scheduled tasks | Laravel Queues, Symfony Messenger, or Action Scheduler | Ch. 11 |
| An AI-powered feature added to an existing app | Laravel Prism or Symfony AI Bundle | Ch. 12 |
| Multiple languages or multiple regional sites | TYPO3, WPML, or Symfony Translation | Ch. 13 |
| Tests, static analysis, and vulnerability scanning | Pest/Larastan, PHPStan/Psalm, composer audit | Ch. 14 |
| Production error visibility | Sentry (or Flare $) | Ch. 14 |
| More throughput without rewriting the app | FrankenPHP / Laravel Octane | Ch. 15 |
| Finding an actual performance bottleneck | Blackfire $ | Ch. 15 |
| Deploying a Laravel app | Forge or Vapor $ | Ch. 16 |
| Deploying onto an existing AWS/GCP/Azure contract | App Runner, Cloud Run, or App Service | Ch. 16 |
| Deploying across several different frameworks consistently | Platform.sh $ | Ch. 16 |
| Deploying WordPress at real, revenue-generating scale | Kinsta or WP Engine $ | Ch. 16 |
| Self-hosting Nextcloud in production | The All-in-One Docker image | Ch. 16 |