Having read 0xDECAFBAD’s post on the PHP framework CodeIgniter, I got excited to try it out for myself. I have been examining every PHP framework I can find and, frankly, they all suck. Then I turned to Ruby-On-Rails. It was love at first sight. Beauty, elegance and style in a programming language and framework, total harmony.

Then it hit me that I would need to learn an entirely new programming language while still supporting all of my clients on PHP, reconfigure servers, and learn the Rails migration strategy. Seems like a nice challenge for the long haul, but I have short term needs that this just wasn’t going to fill.

Thats when I met CodeIgniter. Straight forward. Will work in both my PHP4 and PHP5 environments. The documentation is to die for and digging in to code took the watching of two webcasts and a quick jaunt through the documentation. It uses a nice MVC structure and has a good depth of built in (did I mention these guys document their code) functions ready to handle most common everyday tasks.

Moving to any framework is a challenge, but relearning an entire language to standardize things is rough approach. Throw in the fact that the documentation of most of the other packages is obscure in either clarity or existence makes the task down right daunting. Throw in the fact that, like nearly everyone else we are just beginning to migrate to PHP5, I need something that will hang with us while both feet are on either side of the line.

I can’t say it’s a perfect framework, I have only been using it for less than a day, but I can say that it beats the others I have played with. I will let you know how it goes.