Why the hate for CI still

I must admit I haven't posted in a while.

Welcome back :-)

I hear a lot of people bashing CI, often complaining it doesn't have features, which to be honest, I don't need or have never heard off.  I must admit I have a broad range of skills so I'm probably not as "heavy weight" as some PHP developers out there.

Really? Still? CI felt abandoned for a while and when Ellis lab said they were looking for a new owner, me (and I am sure lots of others) started investing time in other frameworks. But CI was fixed, debugged and brought back to life with CI3. And the direction and commitment of the team behind CI is literally almost perfect (IMHO) and this forum surely proves it is most certainly alive and kicking and growing.

I'm about to undertake another couple of projects and I'm on the verge of using CI.  My only hesitation is all the stuff I read bashing CI, saying it's dead and shouldn't be used on new projects. 

Are you sure this is not old posts and old info about CI2. CI3 is stable, fast, powerful and non-descriptive. It is simply brilliant.

My clients don't really know which is the "best" framework, nor care too much.  But obviously I don't want to go back to them in a couple of years time and told them I picked the wrong thing.

Use it. CI3 will be supported for a long time to come and it has some clever committed people in the core team as well as BCIT behind it as the owner.

However, CI does everything I need it to do.  Really it just helps to structure my code better and throws in a few extra useful things such as form validation, etc, rather than cobbling such things together from scratch.

For me it is the query builder, csrf, session management, form validation, email library and of course the power of libraries and models.

I know when EllisLabs gave up CI a lot of people said it was dead, but this line of thought still seems to be prevalent in 2017 even though it's clearly not dead and CI4 is on the horizon.  Why is this?  I am drawn to it because I understand it and can develop in it quickly - surely that's the important thing?

I have not read these comments recently, and if you have they are simply wrong. And yes, for me, I install CI in about five minutes, convert my HTML design to a few views I use as my building blocks, copy over a few handy libraries and am almost immediately into coding the really interesting bits - the actual workings of the site. So fast, so lightweight and so useful, a true framework that has virtually no bloat. Some people want a default auth system (I most certainly do not), or a default shopping cart (not me), or a blog (again - why?), etc etc. Some people want a CMS etc. If you want these go use the many that are available. With CI you can build all of these, to work how you want them to, to do the things and in the way you choose. It is a toolbox, a brilliant, free, open source, reliable, blazingly fast toolbox.

Don't let the children that are yapping in the background about "my framework is better than yours" change your opinion. You know you love it, you know it makes your life easier, you know you can trust it. What more could you possible want?

Personally, the customer tells me what they want and I build it. The framework it is built with as almost never been an issue, except when they insist they want WordPress - then I double the price and take twice as long with it. I hate using WP (which is a CMS, not a framework).

Good luck with your next project!

Best wishes,

Paul