Has anyone here used it? Any thoughts or complaints about it.

Thanks in advance.

I've been meaning to look at CodeIgniter after an old colleague said they had been using it.

I've just installed it (after reading your post) and TBH it does look promising. I often feel that MVC frameworks are out to control me and are putting up obstacles to slow me down, rather than help me.. but this all seems more reasonable.

Normally I would write applications from scratch, but this time I decided to use a framework to speed it up. I've decided just to bite the bullet and go for it and see what happens. I'll probably write a review once its completed.

The reason I kind of like the framework is it forces you to component-ize everything, which is great for when you want to add new features and changes things around.

Wow, haven't posted on WHT in a long time but I thought I'd chip in. CodeIgniter has been my framework of choice for a while now, I've used several and for me it just hits it on the nose. When considering a framework it's important to find what works for you, all frameworks are different and each have their own pros / cons.

For example, you have Zend Framework which is a great framework and offers a lot of classes to help do everything for you. The problem is I find it too big and too nannying. It tries to do everything for you.

Whereas CodeIgniter suits me much better as it offers the MVC framework and some of the more useful libraries, but still leaving it to me to handle things like authentication and access. This means it's also a smaller package.

However, some people prefer Zend Framework over CodeIgniter due to the fact it offers more classes so it's completely what you (or your team) work best with and what's best for each project.

The only complaint I'd have about CodeIgniter is the session class. For some reason it stores the session data client side in a cookie (which of course is a security risk). The 'store session data in database' option only stores the values to verify the session, the session data is still stored client side. However there are some good classes out there that can be literally dropped in to replace it.

Best of luck! :agree:

Tom, thanks for the heads up about the sessions, I will definitely be dropping in a replacement.

I don't mind that its lacking modules/classes, I prefer to write them anyways.

How well does the framework scale? Its going to be used for a web site that receives about 30M pageviews a month.
I've already installed the CachedObject class, which is exactly what I needed for partial caching.

It all depends. I think if you were looking at maximum performance then the fastest method might be to do it from scratch. However with CodeIgniters output caching, you can get some great speeds. Being able to serve 30M requests also heavily depends on what hardware you plan to use. If you're asking about having multiple servers for your application, sure it's possible but you've got to plan that ahead of time.

Best thing to probably do, is to grab CodeIgniter, do a quick mock up program and then run some benchmark tests on it to see if it performs fast enough. There are too many factors involved with this type of question, hope that helps though! :)