CodeIgniter - Cake Killer
A friend of mine mentioned that he was going to use CodeIgniter in a new project that he was starting. At the time, I was still playing around with CakePHP, the leading rapid development PHP framework (along with Symfony, I suppose… but in my experience, only other people use Symfony, nobody you or I actually know uses it…)
The problem with CakePHP, I was quickly discovering along with other PHP developers, was the serious of lack of decent documentation. There are a number of tutorials available (notably the one from IBM DeveloperWorks), and CakePHP’s own manual. However, all these tutorials use more or less the same example/case study (building a blog) and fail to address even simple things like Access Control Lists (ACL).
To make a long story short, I was struggling with CakePHP, trying to learn it on my own. When a new project came up — with the tentative understanding that we would use CakePHP for it — I decided to take a look at CodeIgniter.
What’s So Great About CodeIgniter?
- The first thing to point out about CodeIgniter is its excellent user guide, notably the online Table of Contents, which is categorized into a detailed list of links dealing with Classes, Helpers, General Topics, etc.
- Next, I love the clean, search-engine-friendly URLs that CI apps have e.g. www.your-site.com/news/article/my_article. In general, CI URLs take the form:
www.your-site.com/class/function/ID