The future of Codeigniter

This has been something on the mind of my dev team for quite some time.

There's no doubt that once upon a time Codeigniter was THE go to platform for php projects. Unfortunately, it simply hasn't kept up. I respect the hard work that Lonnie has put into the project. He's written some great code for 4.0, but to even attempt to keep up with progression in tech nowadays, projects like this need funding and more manpower.

I brought this up to Jim years ago that I thought it would have been way more beneficial for Codeigniter to go the route of Symfony components and have Codeigniter 4.0 become a set of components that people could import into their projects. I understand that he wanted to have a full fledged framework similar to CI3 or Laravel. He even invited me to be a part of the CI foundation (or whatever it was called in the beginning) but I could not convince my team that it was worth the time to try to build codeigniter back up.

At the end of the day, unless Codeigniter manages to garner monumental backing, it will likely continue to be a framework that is better suited for smaller scaled projects or legacy projects.

I own a software development company and we've had consulting opportunities at other large major enterprise corporations. There is absolutely no way we could ever sell using Codeigniter for a new project. There simply isn't enough support, documentation, plug-n-play packages, or community around it for it to be taken into consideration.

I love codeigniter for it was and what it has done, but just judging by all the jobs we get, it's difficult to not think of what the future holds for this project. Every single PHP project we've had to build from the ground up in the last 4 years has been in either Laravel or Symfony. The only Codeigniter projects we got over the last 4 years were companies that were converting legacy CI 3.0 to Laravel.

I'd love to get Lonnies opinion on what the future holds. Part of me would love to see Codeigniter begin the "Marketing" aspect of the framework to try to gain some traction.

Codeigniter is simply one of the tools you need to learn to be a successful developer. Always add more tools to your coding arsenal!