For the last several weeks, our development team at Rare Bird has been evaluating a PHP framework called CodeIgniter. First, some background. We've been hand-rolling sites using a home-brewed PHP framework I first cobbled together over 10 years ago. Over the past 10 years it has seen it's share of evolution and has served us well. However, as we add more staff, each new developer comes with new ideas and habits. It's getting more difficult to educate each on doing it my way when my way is full of strange nuances, and concepts that were great in 2001, but not so great not now.

The time has come to push the restart button and we have a couple of options. We can home-brew something new. I'm sure we could do this, but why? PHP frameworks like Zend, CakePHP and CodeIgniter are readily available and have active communities. My goal is to find something similar to what we're already used to, and see if we can make it work for us.

On the surface, CodeIgniter fit the bill. It has high performance, a small footprint, and allows us to code in an unrestrictive way. (I should interject that we're an Apple shop, and software bloat is not welcome.) We're also a bunch of guys that have been brought up in different programming eras. I like procedural programming in certain cases, and I don't have a problem writing raw SQL — I actually prefer it.

So we're going to see how it goes with CodeIgniter. My first project? This very blog. I did stumble along the way, and you can read more about that in the next post.