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MoqaBilling, my web application for hourly invoicing, is coming along nicely. Below are some screenshots (client and personal details have been blotted out for obvious reasons). They show the “Orange Kiwi” template in use. I intend to make the application completely skinnable using only external .css files.

I’ve been working on a custom billing system. It serves two purposes—to replace my current ’system’, and to serve as a first application with which to learn CodeIgniter.

Here are some screenshots, after two days’ work. The template was inspired by various gelatos at Capogiro, including kiwi and orange cardamom:

Automatically generated .pdf invoice (rough!)

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?

1. 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.
2. 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