I've been a PHP developer for about 6 years now - the last two years I have been pretty inactive though. Just recently though, I have been reading resources on all the different programming patterns (Factory, Singleton, Registry, Observer, etc) to try and get my head around good programming techniques.
For myself though I find that I can only truly understand how these methods work when I am forced to do them myself.
I have a large project I am doing at my workplace (me only) that involves building a very complex PHP application.
I would like to know your professional opinion; should I spend the extra time to program this PHP application myself and really, properly learn all these different programming patterns? Or, should I just build on top of a PHP framework like the Zend Framework for speed's sake (and flexibility/features)?
I have found understanding exactly how the Zend Framework works hard, just because I haven't been exposed to using these programming patterns myself. I hate that - I want to fully understand exactly what is happening in my application and know exactly how each part relates to others.
Thanks in advance!