I like to keep track of all things: shopping list, payments, projects, appointments and so on. In doing so I know when I'm way behind as there is a pile of items in "pending".
So I use Trello (most tasks, projects) integrated with Calendar (appointments, due dates) and Google Sheets (all payments, due dates).
That doesn't sound like a Gitter issue but a lack of activity in that particular project/community.
Some projects prefer email/github issues over chat as there isn't an active community around it 24/7 for anyone to just jump in and ask away.
I maintain an open source project where we have set up Gitter awhile ago. So far -even with a really small community like ours- I'm answering questions and interacting with users regularly.
I was wondering a similar implementation. I encrypt/decrypt database IDs to opaque them on the API. For primary entities but not enums/etc.
I separated API vs Core/Database so I wasn't too fond of adapting the entities to add a sort-of public id column so I create it at run-time.
Laravel I believe matches most criteria above. Symfony would be a second choice.
The driven factor though is community. This is key. No matter how good your framework is if there is no community behind it to create, innovate, talk about it and so on.
Worked with Zend framework 2, which I believe is a great PHP framework, but the community is stagnant. We often have to create modules (libraries) for things most frameworks already had (ie, Symfony).