Show your support!

There is showing support and there is giving support. One way of giving support is by increasing the user base. When a framework is popular with an increasing user base there are knock-on affects such as more people getting involved in asking questions and answering questions, more people who could financially contribute. Generally all round stimulation.

Now I turn to mention a 3rd world County where I should be flying out to this June. If you look at the websites done by Ghanaians’s (even the presidents website) you will see its done using Wordpress.

The main reason for this is that there are very few actual coders in Ghana of Ghanaian origin. That's because coding nor ICT is really taught in schools and very few people around to teach young adults. To use Wordpress of course its just a case of left mouse clicks; there is little  real coding involved. If you ever look into Wordpress, actually its an abomination in terms of code.

Now the requisite for me in a php framework is quite simple :

1) I need to be able to see potential I.e its using php 7+ and that it looks like its going to be supported long term
2) I need to be able to understand it and get the basics going
3) I need to demonstrate that I can easily write my own php OOP classes with class members and methods and that the class can easily be integrated and used; this is because i don't want to be in a "straight jacket".

So I have completed the above three. Now when you take into consideration other frameworks like say Symfony; yes it has some neat tricks where you run bin/console and basic controller code is written for you. However when you look at the knowledge gap between those using Wordpress to what is required to use Symfony ; its a huge task if you were to teach using a php framework like symfony in a 3rd world Country. To be honest I can barely understand symfony it myself.

So I can’t promise anything but I may very well get involved in teaching coding and using Codeiniter4 as it stands at present in its philosophy say of not having to install virtualbox to use it nor to need a  huge bandwidth to download; makes it No 1 as a vehicle to teach.

I’m still getting to grips with CI4 myself but I'm satisfied with the progress so far in that I can use things that I understand. Thus I have PHPMailer working in being able to send myself an email from a contact form using a google account with 2 step verification. Loading of classes likePHPMailer and my own class is working using namespace etc .Thus I can write and also use my own utility classes say eg to clean and take steps to filter what comes from a form using POST in a way that I understand.

In summary I can show some support in stating that CI4 works for me and I may very well introduce it to coders Ghana.