The future of Codeigniter

For some of us, Codeigniter is the means by which we put food on the table.  It's not a joke.  It's not a hobby.  It's not something that's part time.  It's not something that we use to embellish our résumé.  It's something that some of us take very seriously indeed.  Some of us may not always appear on forums like this or in the realms of Github - but we are working night and day for a client base whose businesses depend on Codeigniter.

Like many of you, I know all too well the responsibility that professional web developers have on their shoulders when peoples' mortgages, companies and lifestyles depend upon things working.

No one involved with CodeIgniter are getting paid, and it have been that way since British Columbia Institute of Technology took over. So we all have 9-5 jobs, with friends and family doing this in our spare time. If professional developers would step out of the shadows and help out, we would make greater progress.

Now, I don't want to labour any of this too much - particularly after what has happened - but it appears to be a fact that CI4 has taken the best part of five years to build.  The following facts are also demonstrable:

*  HMVC no longer works with CI3.

*  The guy who made the HMVC addon has disappeared and has not been actively involved with Codeigniter since 2016.

*  On a coding front, the most significant change that has been  brought to CI3 is the addition of thousands of lines of copyright notices.

* HMVC are a addon not made by the CodeIgniter Foundation, and are therefor not officially supported.

* I have seen some forks of it floating around supporting PHP7, but it's made by the Community for the Community. So if you wan't it actively developed, you need to chip in.

* Please see the Change log, of the upcoming CodeIgniter 3.2.0.

Now, IF there is some value proposition or some unique and groundbreaking feature that CI4 brings to the table then - respectfully - I don't know what it is.  However, I have not looked at it for a very long time and I'm absolutely sure that someone here will be able to enlighten me.

TLDR about what's new in CodeIgniter are that everything are namespaces and up to PHP 7 standards and everything that comes with it.

1.  Do you think it's acceptable to take five years to rewrite a framework?

I do, it have mainly been done by one person in his spare time and later on some more people started joining, in the last year or so.

2.  Do you think the insertion of thousands of lines of copyright notices on CI3 represents good intention or petty bureaucracy?

Can you please refer me to that commit, as I do not know what specifics you are talking about. There have always been copyright information in CodeIgniter.

3.  Do you think that Codeigniter is in a stronger position - relative to other frameworks - than it was when it was owned by EllisLab?

Wow, that's 6 years ago man. At the beginning all PHP Frameworks behaved pretty much the same, and CodeIgniter managed to break grounds with a solid user guide and small footprint. After that people thought it lacked new technologies and/or wanted to do different things, and BAM Laravel where born etc.

And CI3 started losing as it didn't get developed to the new standard, and now we are here. CI3 for people who are new to the market (as it's the easiest one) and CI4 that just got released fighting the big boys again.

4.  Now that five years have passed and we have some history to look back upon, how would you rate the management of Codeigniter, on a scale of one to ten, since ownership was passed from Ellislab to the University of British Columbia?

10/10 it's a Community project, if you would rate it something else; You need to do something about it yourself. British Columbia Institute of Technology chose to take the project due to Jim Parry working and teaching there. So it have been him all along.

5.  Given the fact that industry leading frameworks like Angular are component driven (i.e., modular), do you think it was a wise decision for the guardians of Codeigniter to throw out the family jewels and turn their backs on modular web development?

CodeIgniter 4 are modular, you can throw in anything that's namespaces. It have never been more modular than now.
https://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/modules.html

6.  Given the fact that the web development community appears to be on the verge of moving AWAY from centralised, privately owned code sharing websites - such as Packagist and NPM - do you think it was a good idea to tether CI4 to PSR? *

I haven't noticed, everything are Composer compatible. PSR are a coding standard and have nothing to do with Composer.

7.  Codeigniter HAD the fastest benchmarks of all of the leading PHP frameworks.  It's factually provable.  Thanks to PSR-4 autoloading (as seen in CI4) those benchmarks and CI's unique position in the marketplace has now been thrown down the toilet - sacrificed in exchange for some kind of approval from a self appointed governing body who go by the name of PHPFIG.  Do you think this was an exchange that strengthened Codeigniter's position within the marketplace?

No programmer today with a couple of years under his belt would use CodeIgniter 3 for new project, as it's made in an old standard. This sentence could be said with any PHP Frameworks using PSR-4 autoloading, and it's something people are expecting a Framework to have. No one want's to write require_once() just to add a file.

Under the hood CI3 had a "PSR-4" autoloader, not using the PSR-4 standard of course, but it loaded your packages as you would expect. You don't write require_once() anywhere, as CI3 handled that under the hood. The only thing that changed are that we adopted a standard used by everyone, so that everything works with CodeIgniter. Now you can use ALL libraries without any issue, no need to customize it (unless it hooks into the internal functions).

8.  Unless I'm very much mistaken there are no Codeigniter conferences, no podcasts, no official YouTube channel and not even a working 'contact us' form!  This is in stark contrast to the Laravel community, who enjoy a calendar that's packed with all sorts of live events and exciting launches.  So, please help me to understand this... by what definition do any of you think that Codeigniter has a thriving community?

As it's a Community driven project, it's up to you and me to create content. If you want to share you knowledge of CodeIgniter by creating a podcast or Youtube videos, do so! We are up to our ears creating the actual framework and providing support in this forum and on Slack, as there aren't that many of us. It's a small community in this forum, but thriving if I may say so myself.

PS. A new website are being developed, by a couple of community members, so at the moment there aren't that much love put into the website. People tend to get a hold on us in the forum and/or on Slack, not on email. We haven't got everything in order since Jim's passing, so that may be why could not send us an email, due to the lack of time.

9.  To anyone who is involved in the guardianship / ownership of Codeigniter, I'd like to know why you got involved.  In other words, what are your motivations?  What drives you?  What is it that makes you want to be an owner of Codeigniter?  What is it that makes you work from first thing in the morning until last thing at night (presumably) making Codeigniter better? 

I used CodeIgniter in my projects, I had the knowledge to help others, so I did. It's a simple as that. I started out as a beginner myself, reading books and have now been coding for the past 12 years. So I started to share that knowledge to other people, spreading joy. This are a small community, that haven't attracted that many professionals, so without our small guardianship it would be dead.

PS. I'm not part of the CodeIgniter Foundation, I'm just fixing bugs, writing the documentation and answering forum threads.

10.  Given the fact that Codeigniter is now in competition against trillion dollar big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon (via 'Serverless'), how do you think that's working out?  Do you think you can beat them?  Are you feeling confident?  Do you think web developers on mass are going to reject the growing assortment of frameworks that are being produced by the big tech companies and flock towards Codeigniter?  Or are the Codeigniter owners resigned to defeat and now on the verge of being demoted to some kind of niche throwback from the past?  Tell us!  I'd like to know.

If you start comparing yourself with a product made by a trillion dollar company you are a mad man. That said, they didn't start out that way, and now they are a trillion dollar company. You need to start somewhere and build up.
- If the Community start contributing, the skies the limit.
- Of course, there are some bugs here and there, but it will all work out in the end.
- People always go for the hot new thing. Are we that one? Who knows, time will tell.
- Why would I give up? Just look at my post count. ;)

11.  Finally, why should anyone use Codeigniter?  One thing's for sure - you've certainly no longer got the right to talk about market leading benchmarks.  So, go ahead.  I'd love to hear the elevator pitch.  Why should any developer choose Codeigniter?

I'm going to pass on this one. It dosen't matter what I or someone else are saying, test out CodeIgniter and other options and make up your own mind. That's why I choose CodeIgniter in the first place, and stayed.


For someone not wanting to focus on the past, then why did pretty much all your questions have that direction?