Moving from Laravel

Hi,

I have been using Laravel up to this point, a small website with a blog, gallery and a few other elements I built.  I turned to Laravel as I wanted complete control over the way my site worked and nothing gave me exactly what I needed.  I am not a developer just someone who learnt PHP to get what I wanted.

My issue is that with every Laravel release (8 was just launched) it just seem to get more and more complex, introduces new 3rd party tools to learn. Although you can choose not to use, choosing not to appears to fight against the direction of the framework.

Like I say, not a developer and don't want to have to learn Laravel, mix, tailwind, npm, vue and so on just to keep my site running.

So I am looking for an alternative framework that keeps it far simpler.  CodeIgniter has been suggested although I have never used it.

Before I spend time on it I was wondering if some of you had views on the potential issues someone like me will have rebuilding in CI having come from Laravel?  

Thanks for any help.

Codeigniter is really easy to learn, the learning curve compared to laravel is way smaller.

I don't know the structure of your application, but if you have a simple MVC structure inside laravel you wont have any problems re-writing that in Codeigniter.

Website: marcomonteiro.net  | Blog: blog.marcomonteiro.net | Twitter: @marcogmonteiro | TILThings: tilthings.com

Just my $0,02:
My history with CI is that I came from Zend Framework to CI2 many, many years ago. I transitioned to CI3, but with the major changes between CI3 and CI4 and a complete re-write of my projects for CI4 on the horizon I scanned the market for alternatives. Laravel seems to be the de-facto standard of choice with many supporters and even conferences so that was a natural choice. 

I spent a decent amount of time with the documentation and tutorials with an open-mind. The more I started digging into it the more off-putting I found it. The absurd naming conventions and the staggering amount of tools all piled on top of each other, all like Russian dolls just made it impossible to overlook; for example the Laravel Homestead built on top of Vagrant, built on top of Chep and Puppet etc, etc. I am so happy I was trying Laravel on a separate machine that I could reformat after done.
Working with Laravel in PHPStorm was a better experience than CI3/4 because of the Laravel Helper available. Working with CI4 in PHPstorm is better than CI3 (no code-completion helper-files required in CI4) and I think PHPstorm's support for CI4 is good enough. 
Performance-vise I found Laravel a bit sluggish even with OPcache enabled, since I live in PHP 7.3 I couldn't test the preloading available in PHP 7.4+.

I have not pursued the Laravel path and instead ported my first project to CI4 from CI3 and have a CI4 project written from scratch that is about to be released.

I host all projects on AWS ECS and FARGATE using the official docker php73-apache image. Aurora MySQL RDS and REDIS ElastiCache and haven't found any reason to complain about performance and scalability even with hundreds of simultaneous users.

Wishing you all luck with your projects!
/Mattias

Welcome, and if you do run into problems there is usually someone on the forums here that
can help you. First off sit down for a weekend and read the CodeIgniter 4 User Guide that
will really give you a head start learn CodeIgniter.

What did you Try? What did you Get? What did you Expect?

Joined CodeIgniter Community 2009.  ( Skype: insitfx )