Is It Really That Bad That Codeigniter Has A Slow Release Cycle
In one of our breaks from the discussion “vi vs emacs” on the IRC Codeigniter channel we ended up discussing the slow release cycle of our favorite framework. There were some who didn’t like that about Codeigniter, but fortunately we had some people in the channel that were able to give some good points about the other side. A lot of people don’t like that codeigniter is not in the cool kids group anymore. Well that’s ok, I bet the community using the framework was not using it just because it was cool (if you’re using it for that reason, you’re doing it wrong). First let’s get some things out of the way. I love working with Codeigniter and I use it for almost all of my projects. But I’m not here to talk back at people that don’t use codeigniter. People should use what is best for them, or to the task they need to complete.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s proceed.
If you’re looking for the latest awesome features that you can use with php, Codeigniter is not for you, that’s a fact. If you want that you should look into frameworks like Laravel (I’m actually going to do that myself, I need to learn a framework that I can use for those projects where you get in, do the thing and don’t look at that project for the next 10 years. Then after 10 years you look at it and hate yourself as usual).
However, if I have a project that I need to maintain for the next 3 years and I’m going to have to work on a client server and not in one that I chose, I’m definitely going to use Codeigniter. First because the minimum requirement to work with codeigniter on version 3.0 is still PHP 5.2.4 (in a case like this one this is not exactly a bad thing) and secondly, because the release cycle of Codeigniter is slow. This way I don’t have to constantly update the framework on that project and, more than that, I don’t need to worry about stuff like — “OMG, another update, will this update break everything?” — because normally it does not break your stuff (backwards compatibility is actually a big deal to codeigniter), and if it does, you have to do it once or maybe twice a year. It’s really not that hard.
Anyways, what I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of use cases for each framework. These are all things you should consider when you start your project.
I’m out with a reference to another blog post about this subject that is way more complete than mine, and makes some good points about the type of developers out there and what should be considered when starting a new project.
Phil Sturgeon - Understanding the Circumstance
Over and out!