Az Caz & Co

I have just spent the last week or so intermitently ducking in and out of CodeIgniter, a PHP framework and I have to say I am beginning to love it. Previously I have been knee deep in either Wordpress or more recently ModXCMS, however I have been keen to get my hands dirty with a PHP specific framework for a while.

Now for those of you that know what ModX is, your are about to slam me because ModX can be used as a framework, I do realise this but I have never quite got my head around using it in that way, maybe it doesn’t lend itself to that otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up another tool.

Over the years I have worked with a variety of web programming languages however I have always had a desire to go deeper into PHP but because I have been using publishing tools, they have made it easy to shy away from. Wordpress is just bloody good at what it does, once you have used it for blogging I fail to see a need for any other tool. It does however have it’s limitations when it comes to a far more complex site.

ModX is a great CMS, through the use of what they call template variables it has the ability to rapidly customise the data entry and display. Really powerful stuff but because I was working inside their CMS area I always felt a little limited even though it is easy to use and customise a site, I have used it for a few sites now and will most likely use it again. My biggest frustration with it and the primary reason for not rolling it out on this site was that there was no automatic hook or quick hack to get it to play nice with my Wordpress stuff. I could go ahead and move my blog into a sub folder but I am not convinced I want to do that yet, from what I have been reading, Code Igniter plays very well with Wordpress and this is a huge plus.

So why am I enjoying CodeIgniter? Good question! Perhaps it is the tinkerer in me wanting to take full control of my code base, the more I read about CI (as they call it), the more I like it. I have dabbled with many content management systems over the years and also tried getting into the various flavours of the month such as Django, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP but the learning curve has always got in the way of productivity.

CI seems to be straight forward, yes it does have a learning curve but it is isn’t intimidating me, I have found myself reading a bucket load about it, and what’s more I am finding it fun and am already thinking of how and where I can use it.

Do you have experience of using CodeIgniter or other frameworks? How did you find them? Why do you use them? Where do you use them? When do you pick one tool over another? I will write more on these questions at a later date but for now I am interested in what you have to say…

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