What helpers/libraries do you find yourself using that aren’t included with codeigniter? (What are the most common things that are helpful to you with most projects)?

Actually the only one I’ve called in (rather than ending up writing my own helpers/libraries etc) is Sparklines .. which isn’t a CI library per se, but can be dropped in just as easily as a native one.

I use Redux Auth a lot, that and a few admin classes I have written to speed up admin development.

Datamapper Overzealous, DX_Auth, and a custom helper file with a bunch of boilerplate functions that I keep reusing.

I typically bring in automatic Model discovery and automatic partial view discovery on each of my projects. I wrote about these two libraries here.

X2 for DataMapper Overzeals Extension (DMZ). Only one I use at the moment.

Where I normally start with after a clean checkout from CI is our in-house Auth library (just because I know it by hearth), usually 3 base controllers to replace MY_Controller (front-end, back-end, admin), some custom helpers (data sanitation, date/time) I have gotten used to, an MY_Model based on this and our in-house MY_Router to have some extra routing ‘magic’.

Other than that it’s pretty much a basic install: usually I just extend some core feature to suit my personal preference, which is imho one of the greatest strengths of CodeIgniter in general.