If there is one thing that I could name besides the extensible plugin system that I love about WordPress it would have to be the theming and templating system. Most of my projects consist of using WordPress or Codeigniter, and one thing that I find myself wishing Codeigniter had was a template and theming library that worked similarly to how WordPress works.

Wordpress works on the premise of the following files’ header, footer, sidebar and index page as well as the existence of a style.css file that defines the themes meta info such as the name, description, author and descriptive tags. If Codeigniter had something like this in the form of a library, that would be awesome.

This leads me to my next point, I’m going to slowly develop a library for Codeigniter that does this. Many will argue Phil’s template library or Colin Williams template libraries are sufficiently good enough, and for many it probably is, but I personally find them to be too involved and not as simplistic as WordPress.

I’m wanting to do a near 1:1 port of the WordPress theming system, right down to the ability to have page specific templates which would basically mean if you have a controller called auth and a method in that controller called login, the controller by default (unless otherwise specified) would load the view login inside of a folder called auth in the current theme folder. A few frameworks already have something similar to this.

I’ve set up a Github project if anyone else would like to contribute, which can be found here. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.