If I don't want a PHP framework, what am I asking for and what's out there?

Question

I've spent a lot of time reviewing the various PHP frameworks. I found Yii the best of the best, but the more I got into it, the less comfortable I felt with an architecture that takes a lot of responsibility (and transparency) away from the developer.

I'm looking for (a library? a toolkit?) that will give me the benefit of consistent documentation and functionality without forcing me to us its definition of MVC. I looked into FatFree, but its GPL.

Is there anything out there that people are using that they could point me to?

Edit: Thanks all for helping me clarify! I think I'm looking for something closer to Zend that is more a collection of methods that allows me to define my own structure but call upon a toolkit whenever I need certain functionality.

Zend seems too monolithic. And I can certainly roll my own, but I'm wondering if there is simply something out there that has a community and peer support that I am overlooking.

Answer 1

There's Flourish. I used it for several projects, and found it quite good. It describes itself as an 'Unframework', which might be what you are looking for.

Regarding licensing issues: as noted above, the project's license doesn't really matter unless you want to redistribute it. In which case, I think you will find Flourish's license quite suitable: it's MIT.

Answer 2

Thanks to you all, I was pointed into the right search direction and came across several answers to my own question:

What I am/was looking for are PHP Components that tend to be more loosely coupled together but are peer supported more as a collection rather than a tool.

Apache Zeta Components (formerly EZComponents) is in the incubator right now. Symfony is building out and supporting components of their own. Zend we mentioned above but may prove cumbersome due to dependencies. And of course I completely forgot about PEAR...

Symfony intrigues me mostly because it looks like they are dumping support into it, whereas all I ever heard about it was that it was a very top-heavy framework.