Lumen VS Slim

Popularity: Lumen’s got 7.6k GitHub stars and a decent following, but its 2024 buzz was quieter than Flight’s meteoric rise. It leans hard on Laravel’s ecosystem, which is great if you’re already in that world, less so if you want something standalone.

Lumen is also a micro-framework used for developing PHP-powered web applications with 7.6k stars and 1k forks on GitHub. It is based on the Laravel framework and is specifically designed to build microservices and smaller, lightweight applications. The same team behind Laravel creates it and also shares some of its components. But, It is different from Laravel because it doesn’t offer compatibility with any additional Laravel libraries like Cashier, Passport, Scout, etc.

There's a note right in project page:

Lumen

Lumen is a stripped down version of Laravel for building APIs. This makes it a lightweight framework. I'm currently using Lumen in a project and I want to use this opportunity to share some of the things I've learnt.

Official website: lumen.laravel.com

I think there are micro frameworks like lumen that are far more accessible in the first steps (https://lumen.laravel.com).

see also: https://github.com/laravel/lumen

Hey PHP fans! Welcome to 2025—a year where PHP continues to shine as the backbone of the web (sorry, haters, it’s not going anywhere!). If you’re building a slick API, a lightweight app, or just want to ditch the bloat of full-stack frameworks, micro frameworks are your ticket to coding bliss. Today, we’re diving into the top four PHP micro frameworks: Slim PHP, Flight PHP, Fat-Free Framework (F3), and Lumen—plus a few honorable mentions to keep things spicy.

What do you think of Slim Framework as far as best practices for modern PHP in a micro framework (which is similar to OP's Dumbo)? Are there any other micro frameworks you recommend?

https://www.slimframework.com/

Currently Laravel is the "go to" for new PHP applications to mostly developers today, if not, plain PHP, Slim, Symfony and other frameworks does the job, but for Wordpress, custom PHP boilerplates or/and outdated PHP patterns (aka, single ton) is what we have for work in mostly cases, if not, hacky ways to integrate frameworks as Laravel itself or parts of it to leverage a better code structure.

Slim is a micro PHP framework used for web development with 11.7k stars and 2k forks on GitHub. It has a simple and intuitive API development process. It is a micro-framework, meaning you only get a minimum of support for HTTP requests and forwarding requests to appropriate controllers. So the question is, why should you choose a micro-framework? Because it offers you flexibility and high extensibility.

Slim 4, a minimalistic PHP micro-framework, offers middleware support to easily add CORS headers. Middleware in Slim acts like a series of layers through which your app sends a request. One such layer can be responsible for adding CORS headers.

SlimPHP 3 Skeleton app shows this as well: https://github.com/slimphp/Slim-Skeleton/blob/3.1.8/public/index.php

How hard did you look? There are plenty out there. FastRoute, Phroute, based on FastRoute, with basic middleware, League/Route - routing with middleware, using FastRoute, PSR 7 & 15, Slim Framework, at it's core, it like League/Route, etc. None of these require a full framework to use.