CodeIgniter

[Jackolantern]

I have been reading CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo, and I have to say I am loving the CI framework! While the book leaves a bit to be desired (you can easily tell that English is not the author's first language, and it was basically left unedited by a native speaker), the code examples are all sound, and the book is clear and concise. However, this thread is not meant to be a review of this book. Instead, I am wanting to say that Kaos was right, and CI is a great framework, and by far the easiest to use, the most flexible, and the all-around best that I have used yet in my adventures in PHP frameworks of the last 2 weeks or so.

The MVC web development pattern is a Godsend. I enjoyed the separation of logic from structure in ASP.NET, and PHP's "one-pot" mixture looked primitive by comparison. MVC is definitely an evolution for PHP development that moves it more towards the organization of Microsoft's web forms. All of your database code is in your models, all of your display HTML and interface is in your views, and your actual application logic is in your controllers, which act as the gatekeeper for your whole system. Routing scripts and .htaccess files keep your URLs smooth and SEO-friendly (no "file.php?variable=value&pw=12345" URLs). And there is a whole slew of other features, too.

I highly suggest to anyone interested in medium-to-large-scale web development to check out CodeIgniter. I can already see the potential in it, and I think I will be using it on all of my future projects except for the smallest of single pages.

[Chris]

I used to use CI until I thought of a few improvements of my own. So I made my very own framework. I do have to say CI is one of the best frameworks out here and it will definitely tick almost all of the boxes you need from a framework. I just couldn't get the desired result for the CMS system I was working on to go with it. I can't wait till February when I'll have time to continue on that project. My cache system works miles better than the one on CI .

[kaos78414]

It's awesome that you chose to use CI, now we can help each other out when we have issues.

At this point, I actually have a modified version of CI 1.7.3 that I use to set up new projects, which includes my own custom template building library and a CSRF protection library. I make changes to this set when I find that I'm using something for every project, so I can get set up faster for a new project.

But I really can't wait for CI Reactor. I'm not sure if you read about it, but the developers working on it are excellent programmers, so hopefully they can improve CI.

EDIT: Oh and I agree with Chris about the cache system. This is something that Reactor is probably going to fix, but currently CI's cache system is not the most intuitive.

[Jackolantern]

I never heard about "Reactor". What is that?

[kaos78414]

CI is now split into two slightly different projects, starting at v2.0. There is CI Core, which when it comes out will pretty much be the same as CI1.7.3, just with some needed bug fixes and deprecated PHP4 support (so some libraries have changed to accommodate this). Then there's CI Reactor, which will be developed at a faster pace and include features which the community wants.

Features from Reactor will be ported over to Core at a slower pace, to allow for more testing. This means that Core will probably be more stable, but Reactor will have more features and newer code.

[Jackolantern]

Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks!

[hallsofvallhalla]

looked into CI sometime back. will take another peek.

[Jackolantern]

I definitely believe that the MVC pattern is the superior method of web development, regardless of whether you use CI, CakePHP, Zend or whatever. I just preferred CI due to the simplicity of its setup. I could never even get another one of the frameworks fully up and running, but CI was just a simple unzip to get the file structure and library, and then a simple edit on 1 or 2 text files and I was up and running.

Even if you don't go with CI, Halls, I think that you could greatly benefit from MVC development. PHP is so incredibly disorganized, and the "one-pot" method of development that lumps the structure with the behavior just looks so barbaric compared to MVC. It will slow you down a tad on very small pages, and I would probably not use it for something small such as a simple algebra calculator. But for anything large enough to use a database and/or multiple pages, it is amazing and helps keep code separate, organized, clean and maintainable.

[hallsofvallhalla]

sounds great.