build big complex project with CI? (honest views from experienced devs)

[eluser]johndoe123[/eluser]
[quote author="Colin Williams" date="1217028837"]

What I do in my applications is to create an ‘admin’ controller group with all the necessary controllers to perform the admin functions. This way I can easily share the models, libraries, helpers, etc between the public facing site and the admin. If you use separate applications you might end up duplicating more code.

That's what I do as well. Except, I also like to have, say, my Blog controller have a create() method, as opposed to having a special admin controller that ALSO handles Blogs, so I've kinda moved away from this structure as of late. I think I'm more strict about my Controllers in CI than most people, though (some of you have caught on to that).[/quote]

i thought it would be more secured to have the admin and frontend totally seperated.. each using different sessions for authentication etc..

[eluser]matthewr[/eluser]
It's like any other framework out there. It's good if you use it right. If you build your web app correctly then it's a good framework and can handle big projects. Look what happened to Twitter and Rails. Everybody kept saying Rails was awesome and it can scale like crazy because of how basecamp performed, but when the twitter guys used it, it scaled like crap. You see, it wasn't the framework at all but the how the application was developed.

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]

i thought it would be more secured to have the admin and frontend totally seperated.. each using different sessions for authentication etc..

There's no inherent security gained by moving controller methods around. Sessions aren't tied to Controllers either, they're tied to other factors (browser, IP, domain, etc) When we're talking about authentication, I'm using the same checks in my controller methods regardless of whether they're in an admin folder or not. The particular authentication/user library I use has an access check, $this->user->access('create blog post');, so it's easy enough to check in the appropriate controller method as needed.

[eluser]Patrick Otten[/eluser]
I built http://www.videocopilot.net/ with CodeIgniter. I think that is a fairly large project and has a very large user base. The site runs like a champ. Of course I integrated Wordpress and phpBB3 into it, so those are like addon libraries in CodeIgniter, but I stand by it, I think CodeIgnitor is capable of anything you throw at it.

[eluser]Crafter[/eluser]
Nice topic.

I have build two sites that would qualify as a "big complex" site.

The first site is a CMS that included multilingual content, user templates, style choosers, complex nested searches, infinite category levels and the works. I must reiterate what matthewr and others are saying, that you need to develop your application in a manner that will assist to mimimise the complexity. But once you have that, then CI is splendid in putting the pieces together. I was able to integrate nicely with other PHP libraries, JavaScript libraries/frameworks and static HTML/CSS/... code

The other is a booking engine for a domestic airlines, and qualifies for "big complex" due to complex business rules and data volumes, Again, no major problems with CI here.

My one biggest bugbear was native CI support for a modular application approach. There are a number of nice third party contributions in this regard, but I discovered them too late in the projects. Otherwise, life would have been a lot easier for me.

[eluser]a.somervell[/eluser]
Just about to round out a new very big very complex site in CI, there's a very simple way to look at this. CI is a Framework, Joomla is a CMS.

If you want to build your own CMS and re-invent the wheel, I believe CI is the single best PHP framework to build it in, from years of experience.

Your other options are probably CakePHP and Symfony.