Just General Questions

Hello,

New to CodeIgniter, but have some PHP knowledge.

For sometime I have wanted to do some development of some small projects to have that 'accomplishment' in my life. I am now to that point to where I am ready to get off my butt, and do it. So, I have spent a few days looking over sites, and see that a few applications use CodeIgniter. So, here I am....

1) I want to develop as site very similar to clashcaller.com for the Android Game Clash of Clans (Not here to promote either). I just think that this would be a nice project to do, and want to do it. Is this up the alley of CodeIgniter, or something else?

2) Am I misunderstanding the concept of CodeIgniter? Is it to make it easier for PHP development, or add on to the project?

Thanks,
Gene

Hello. If you are new to CodeIgniter, it is no problem. I am new also. Problem could be, if you are not familiar with OOP (Object Oriented Programming) in PHP 5.3+. If you do not know what is the object or class, you should avoid any modern PHP framework.

But if you have no problems with OOP, the CodeIgniter framework is right for you. It is the best PHP framework for beginner programmers I think. Start with CodeIgniter 3 (almost finished) and read the documentation. There is everything you need for start. It could be thought, but when you learnt it, you will never want to be without it. Good luck. :-)

CodeIgniter is "just" a framework, so it's helping you while programming your application. It offers a few standard functions, that makes your life soo much easier, when coding in PHP.
I think it's absoluty worth trying out, since it gives you the opportunity to write clean code, after a nice pattern (MVC).
To answer your question, yes you can use CI for something like that, but you have to accept that CI won't give you everything, but still a lot.
And yes, CI is, just like most other frameworks, to make your PHP life easier. 
I personally think CI is good, because it's not as big and complex as some other frameworks, and you can make the best out of it, if you have a little bit of knowledge about CI (as well as of PHP).
A good starting point would be the documentation.

Go for it, it's not to hard if you understood the concept of CI!  

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1) I want to develop as site very similar to clashcaller.com . . . Is this up the alley of CodeIgniter, or something else?

Sure, Codeigniter is fine for a site like clashcaller.com. It's fine for even more complex sites.

2) Am I misunderstanding the concept of CodeIgniter? Is it to make it easier for PHP development, or add on to the project?

The purpose of Codeigniter is indeed to make PHP development easier. It gives you an organized way to do things. Someone else said that if you didn't know about OOP, that Codeigniter was not for you, but I have to disagree. The amount of OOP you need to know is not much and easy to learn.

I don't think Codeigniter would be very successful as an addon to another project, if you mean something like half Wordpress and half Codeigniter.

I think the basic thing about Codeigniter is this. It takes your URLs and what to execute. So if you have a URL like http://www.example.com/character/generate/knight, Codeigniter is going to look for for the file character.php in your controller directory, and execute the generate function in that file after passing it the argument "knight." Your generate function then builds a character of the Knight class. To do that without Codeigniter (or some framework) would take a lot of coding.

Hey, don't work without a PHP debugger. Several free IDEs have this features built in. Two are NetBeans and CodeLobster. Without a debugger, it's like you're driving with a blindfold on -- you are going to crash!