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Hello fellas! While searching for freelance jobs, i checked one that had as a requirement the knowledge in codeigniter.

I didn't know what was that, so googled it, and found out it's a framework for designing websites.
That seems cool i guess, since all my websites are coded from the 0, and not with the best skills, only with halls and w3schools tutorials

But i think it's time to move on.. I tried codeigniter, it was pretty good and simple.. but i just don't feel like to learn it if i don't have the knowledge on the rest of the frameworks, so i want to ask you if you know anything about this, and if you recommend a simple to learn and use for basic but yet professional websites.

vitinho444, a framework is like a plague. Now on internet you will found "codeigniter programmer" not "php programmer" or "zend programmer" . Many of them have no ideea about PHP, how it works, they use just some functions created by real programmers. I suggest you to use it now but, if you want a good project and easy to work on code source, create your own programming style and a library with functions and this is it, my advice.

Well, i agree with you. I prefer doing my own code because i understand every piece of it. Not some framework written by others.. that's like using joomla or wordpress to make a website..

But per example, i would like to add some widgets to my website and i cant without a framework already built-in. I just can't find a slider for news to put it on my website, even my dropdown menu is a little bugged

I love Codeigniter!

I actually have to disagree Overras. In my opinion, PHP is an utter mess due to its inception as one of the earliest web development-oriented platforms. It came into the web while Javascript was considered a toy for geeky web designers to add snow falling effects on their pages lol. Also, no one really found any fault with mixing HTML and PHP at the time, even though they were regularly suffering through website redesigns each time their client needed something changed as they tried to piece together where and how all of the HTML is made. And now with Javascript chugging along on pretty much every website, you could literally be coding in 3 languages at the same time: HTML, PHP and Javascript. I know I did before finally accepting more structure, and my code was a mess because of it.

While "Separation of Concerns" is kind of a buzz word today, the software development world as a whole has pretty much uniformly accepted it to be the best way to do large, complex software development. I don't always agree with how far people are taking it, such as the deep, heavy MVC/MVVM frameworks for client-side Javascript lol. But when you have a huge, complex web application and you have to update something, you will love yourself for having all the major technologies separated into their own sections that interact in a meaningful and coherent way. HTML templates or layouts are in one place, the PHP behavior is in another, as well as your data being segregated and accessed cleanly and CSS in external files like it always has been. It really does make development easier.

I think the issue of people using frameworks but not understanding the language itself is more valid for things such as jQuery and Ruby on Rails. They have become so huge and common that people go straight for learning the framework and can't be bothered to learn the underlying language, causing severe problems since the framework is still the language! But I have not seen a ton of devs using CI or another PHP framework without knowing how to work with PHP. Granted, I have seen a few, but it is nowhere near as prevalent as with these other 2 (which I see those kinds of devs all the time).

Jackolantern wrote:I love Codeigniter!

I actually have to disagree Overras. In my opinion, PHP is an utter mess due to its inception as one of the earliest web development-oriented platforms. It came into the web while Javascript was considered a toy for geeky web designers to add snow falling effects on their pages lol. Also, no one really found any fault with mixing HTML and PHP at the time, even though they were regularly suffering through website redesigns each time their client needed something changed as they tried to piece together where and how all of the HTML is made. And now with Javascript chugging along on pretty much every website, you could literally be coding in 3 languages at the same time: HTML, PHP and Javascript. I know I did before finally accepting more structure, and my code was a mess because of it.

While "Separation of Concerns" is kind of a buzz word today, the software development world as a whole has pretty much uniformly accepted it to be the best way to do large, complex software development. I don't always agree with how far people are taking it, such as the deep, heavy MVC/MVVM frameworks for client-side Javascript lol. But when you have a huge, complex web application and you have to update something, you will love yourself for having all the major technologies separated into their own sections that interact in a meaningful and coherent way. HTML templates or layouts are in one place, the PHP behavior is in another, as well as your data being segregated and accessed cleanly and CSS in external files like it always has been. It really does make development easier.

I think the issue of people using frameworks but not understanding the language itself is more valid for things such as jQuery and Ruby on Rails. They have become so huge and common that people go straight for learning the framework and can't be bothered to learn the underlying language, causing severe problems since the framework is still the language! But I have not seen a ton of devs using CI or another PHP framework without knowing how to work with PHP. Granted, I have seen a few, but it is nowhere near as prevalent as with these other 2 (which I see those kinds of devs all the time).

Yes, is an earliest programming language but PHP is the base of everything . Codeigniter, Zend etc. So, a "Zend" programmer is not a "PHP" programmer in my opinion.

Well, framework programming in PHP is still closer to PHP programming than jQuery programming is to JS programming In most PHP frameworks, your lines of code are still basically regular PHP. They are just organized better. Zend is one of the few that does offer a heavy load of libraries to aid with most tasks, so it is possible a lot of lines could be Zend object method calls. I don't really like Zend In CodeIgniter, a framework with fairly few extra tools outside of the MVC functionality, almost every line is just regular PHP

Another 2 frameworks to consider are Yii and Laravel.
I have coded a bit in Yii, but am now looking at Laravel.

I've never heard of Laravel before, but it looks pretty interesting

Jackolantern wrote:I've never heard of Laravel before, but it looks pretty interesting

I was looking for something similar to Ruby on Rails and Laravel seems to be a close match.

Really, most of the frameworks are pretty close to Ruby on Rails since that was the original model for basically all MVC web frameworks. However, if you meant it was similar to RoR as in it is complete stack (for example, an ORM, template system, command line tools, etc.), you could also check out CakePHP. While I have not used RoR much as I am not a Ruby fan, I have heard it was essentially a port of RoR to PHP. PHP on Trax was also meant to be a framework that was very much like RoR, but I don't believe it is that popular.