CodeIgniter: My first look

I have been looking at learning how to use a PHP framework for some time now. There are many of them, which can be found here: http://phpframeworks.com . I have chosen CodeIgniter as my first framework to learn as it was recommended by peers and its features seemed to be exactly what I have been looking for.

A quick look at some of the features CodeIgniter has to offer:

Like Ruby on Rails, CodeIgniter allows the user to interface with the database using active records and encourages use of the model-view-controller architectural pattern.

• PHP 4 Compatible

• Extremely Light Weight

• Support for Multiple Database Platforms

• Form and Data Validation

• Security and XSS Filtering

• Session Management

• Email Sending Class. Supports Attachments, HTML/Text email, multiple protocols (sendmail, SMTP, and Mail) and more.

• Image Manipulation Library (cropping, resizing, rotating, etc.). Supports GD, ImageMagick, and NetPBM

• File Uploading Class

• FTP Class

• Localization

• Pagination

• Data Encryption

• Benchmarking

• Full Page Caching

• Error Logging

• Application Profiling

• Scaffolding

• Calendaring Class

• User Agent Class

• Zip Encoding Class

• Template Engine Class

• Trackback Class

• XML-RPC Library

• Unit Testing Class

• Search-engine Friendly URLs

• Flexible URI Routing

• Support for Hooks, Class Extensions, and Plugins

• Large library of “helper” functions

When extracted CodeIgniter takes up just over 2MB of disk space which to me seems quite hefty. However, after doing some research it seems that most other frameworks are a lot bigger. CodeIgniter promises to reduce development time and aid developers to conform to a common standard.

Having a look inside the extracted folder, developers will do most of their coding inside system->application. Inside the application folder there are the view and controller folders where you will most likely spend most of your time coding. The controller folder is where you will program your functions and classes. The view folder is where you will code the actual design and call in data processed in the controller folder. There are also a few other folders that mainly serve the purpose of configuration of your web application.

After my first use of CodeIgniter I was fairly impressed. I was able to make a moderately complex application in not a lot of time. I liked how everything was separated in a nice and easy to find way. I made use of a few of the provided libraries and was impressed at how easily they worked.

I did run into a few issues however, but I won’t highlight them in this article as I’m sure its just because I am still not that experienced with some of CodeIgniter’s workings.

Thanks for reading this article and keep a look out for more about CodeIgniter in the near future.