After over a year since EllisLab announced they would be discontinuing development of Codeigniter and finding a new owner and or owners, EllisLab have finally announced they have found a suitable owner to take over the Codeigniter framework and brand.
Whew! Lengthy search and process is winding down. @codeigniter has a new home. Details will follow soon.
— EllisLab (@EllisLab) August 22, 2014
The owner nonetheless is the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) who have a course that teaches Codeigniter amongst other things, so they have a vested interest in seeing the framework continue to thrive and evolve.
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.
Codeigniter’s lack of an authentication system is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you don’t need to conform to a pre-written and and conventionalised auth library, the curse is that writing your own can cause severe headachaes and countless hours of developing something that comes standard in most other PHP frameworks.
I am a huge fan of CakePHP’s authentication library, it has an ACL and Auth system baked in, which works really well and is super extensible, but the framework itself is a proverbial piece of shit disguised as a PHP framework.
It’s amazing the difference a year can make. This article is pretty outdated now, I’ve since written a follow-up which addresses the comparative points of both frameworks a little easier and in-depth. Both frameworks have evolved since I wrote this, check out the updated comparison here.
I’ve been getting a lot of traffic off Google from people searching “Codeigniter vs FuelPHP”, so I thought I would write a post explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each. Whilst FuelPHP might appear to be a new kid on the block, the similarities between Codeigniter and FuelPHP aren’t that much in terms of performance, coding or speed.
Ever wanted to have plugin functionality in your Codeigniter applications similar to what WordPress has? I’ve started developing a plugin system that lets you define hooks with or without arguments, to modify certain parts of your application without your users having to edit core files.
Use is mostly: add_action(), remove_action() and do_action() – but I’ll go in depth later on.
Documentation is sparse for now, but if you’re a seasoned programmer you should understand how it works. There is a partial plugin example in the repo too.
Codeigniter is an awesome framework, it’s idea of a parser library that ships with it is not. I have written a simple library that extends Codeigniter’s native view loading to allow you to use Smarty 3 in your Codeigniter projects to render your views.
Requirements: Codeigniter 2.0 as this library uses the core and third_party folders, although with some changes it will work with 1.7.2 / 1.7.3 versions of Codeigniter. Features: Extends native Codeigniter view loading so you can still use $this->load->view() to load your templates. This also means that if your Codeigniter application is using $this->load->view() you won’t need to change any of your code to use this library. Allows you to use Smarty specific features including template inheritance inside of your views. Uses your views directory for loading templates but the location of views can be changed if you don’t use the standard CI views folder. Comes bundled with the latest version of Smarty already. Install: Copy all of the files from the download zip off the repo into your application directory. Then you should be able to just load Smarty views using the native $this->load->view() notation.