I want to know the plan of CI, as you know, kohanaphp will deliver the next child soon. How about our CI? Please give me a little information on this; or please give some suggestion for CI future, what’s she should look like?

Any feedback is thankful.

Be patient. EllisLab has something baking in the oven, but I don’t know specifics. A little birdie tells me you’ll be pleased with the results.

I know what it is. It’s a next-gen framework with a revolutionary interface. Basically, the caricature of Rick from the ellislab home page pops up in a little animated flash movie and asks you a range of questions about the app you want to build, and Voila! All you need to do is style it and your done.

...

Colin Williams - 05 June 2007 10:25 AM

Basically, the caricature of Rick from the ellislab home page pops up in a little animated flash movie and asks you a range of questions about the app you want to build, and Voila! All you need to do is style it and your done…

But can you turn off the guitar accompaniment?

That cracked me up.  Martin, welcome to CI!  We’re moving forward as hard as ever.  CodeIgniter is largely driven by the development of ExpressionEngine.  As EE is planning a new release in the near(ish) future, it would be reasonable to assume that CI will have another release shortly after that. 

If you’re looking for a specific feature roadmap, you won’t find one really, since the development of the framework is very organic - but even if we did tell announce what we were up to (and I can’t because we don’t really know) there’s no guarantee that the implementation would be suitable to your needs, so I’d encourage you to always, without exception, make decisions regarding a framework based on what’s currently available and not plans.

But can you turn off the guitar accompaniment? wink

c’mon we all know thats going to be the part of the “nearly zero configuration.”

*although there are 8 config files *

coolfactor - 05 June 2007 09:49 AM

Be patient. EllisLab has something baking in the oven, but I don’t know specifics. A little birdie tells me you’ll be pleased with the results.

are they baking.. cake ? OMG the rumors are true, cakephp and CI merge! 

Derek Allard - 05 June 2007 04:46 PM

If you’re looking for a specific feature roadmap, you won’t find one really, since the development of the framework is very organic - but even if we did tell announce what we were up to (and I can’t because we don’t really know)

Well, Derek, I must say that this is a really scary post and, moreover, message you’re giving us. You have no idea about what you’re doing? Or what we should expect?

I do appreciate there may not be any plans at all, but I believe the foundation of OS is that at least one tries his/her best to inform their community.

We are using CI for all of our work now and are developing, a bit reluctantly, our libraries and helpers… But what faith and effort can we put here, after a message like this. Funny thing is, we, like many others, are here offering to help progressing something we find really valuable, but we do very little or no feedback at all.

Sorry to say, I have tested thoroughly EE and didn’t find it very interesting, because it is a ‘closed’ development, which is too narrow in scope - or so it seems to me - for truly becoming a flexible solution for content management.

But CI is another story. It does allow to CREATE freely and quickly, amazing and scalable applications. Fact is, we are not even asking you to develop it, just to share your vision and there would be plenty of very serious and capable developers willing to help.

I was rather shocked that my previous post went (nearly) completely ignored, when a couple of months ago I published the news that we had released the new National Galleries of Scotland site, build on CI. Here you have a site, with hundreds of pages, at least 40 different templates, an e-commerce system, online museum, Flash activities and more (you name it). Proving that CI has the potential to explode and show Ruby people what PHP is really capable of. I was skeptical and worried when we started the development, but CI proved extremely reliable.

No one from you guys even bothered replying to my post or getting in touch, when I had offered help and experience.

And now this. And the spin off projects.

The question is: why one develops such a good thing, lure others and then…?

I’m rather deeply discouraged.

Best regards, Cristiano
Keepthinking - www.keepthinking.it

I do NOT understand all the whining taking place lately.  I’ve kept quiet about it but this is starting(??) to get ridiculous.

CI is open source but Ellis Labs obviously isn’t looking for outside help on expanding CI…and they have every right to keep the contributors limited to their own folks.  CI is incredibly extensible and lightweight…a very powerful combination in my opinion.

If you are looking to contribute to a CI-based project then there are others that will include you as you are probably aware.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I’ve not yet used 85% of CI’s abilities and features so I obviously think it does everything I need it to do!  If I need a bug fixed I just fix it and submit the report.  I trust that Rick and the gang will get to it when they can…and if they never do then I’m ok with that too.

CI has made my life SO much easier since I’ve discovered it…I’m deeply grateful for all that Rick has provided and I guess that’s why I’ve taken the position of being patient.  I believe in CI and it’s philosophy and have no interest in seeing it bloat.

Anyway…I’ve said enough for now.  Bottom line is stop the whining already…be patient or go to a fork of CI and do your thing there.

</soapbox>

I think there’s a lot of unwarranted criticism and unnecessary anger going around lately. CI has vastly improved how I code, and in short order. Likewise, I’m using Expression Engine on a project currently because it kicks ass as well. (Neither one is perfect, but they both have saved me HUGE amounts of work AND made me look good.)

The EE site’s Knowledge Base has this quote in the FAQ’s:

Is there an ExpressionEngine Roadmap?

Roadmaps are unreliable. If we say Feature X will be available on Date Y and then it isn’t, people get mad. This gets compounded if people are making business decisions based on a roadmap. And people will make business decisions even if we have big disclaimers in bold red type based on a roadmap. The reason for the delay usually doesn’t matter to people either.

We don’t like people making decisions on features that aren’t released. Further, until you can actually experience a feature you won’t know if it will really work for you. So even if the feature is released on the projected date you’d still have no way to evaluate if the feature meets whatever needs you might have. In our opinion the whole thing just gets messy and leads to PR nightmares that can simply be avoided with one little line:

Always, without exception, make decisions regarding EE based on what’s currently available.

Link

This says it better than anything I can say and applies equally well to CI. Roadmaps are unreliable at best. Base what you’re going to do on what’s currently available. End of story.

Speaking of CI, we don’t own it. EllisLab does. End of story. It’s based on a commercial (as in paid) piece of software and has been released as a gift to us all. The license is very flexible, allowing us to pretty much do whatever we want with it. CI is a great starting point, and does things so well, I completely understand people wanting to get involved.

Involvement might be correcting a bug, adding a feature, or helping in the forums. It’s as voluntary as using CI itself is voluntary. Likewise, it’s voluntary for anyone at EllisLab to use anything presented to them. If you don’t like that, then you can either not use CI or customize it to your liking. If you don’t have the skills or time to do that, sure, that kind of sucks, but it’s important to keep in mind at all times: CI is NOT our baby. It belongs to EllisLab and is available, maintained, changed, developed and presented strictly at their pleasure. This has been stated directly and indirectly, and I think it’s a bit unrealistic to expect anything different.

Don’t get me wrong, you don’t necessarily have to like it. It is frustrating to offer something to the community (and the owners of the project) only to have it seemingly ignored, dismissed, or disregarded.  But since that is reality and not likely to change in the near future, it is something that we have to deal with. Personally, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal since we’re aware of it, but can see where others differ. And doing so probably works to discourage outside help. That’s a choice that EllisLab has made.  And that’s also why there is currently another project based on CI with a different set of stated goals. That’s the beauty of the gift that CI is: we can do what we want with it.

Some might say that CI and any derivative projects compete with each other, but I think they can complement each other. Rick Ellis stated this eloquently enough. If you don’t like the way CI is handled, use something else. Better yet, use CI to make something else. That this something else might be based on CI, but with different goals, more public input, faster development, etc. is a huge bonus. The best of both worlds is available: a user-directed CI-based framework, or a tightly-controlled framework that has open source, but a more closed development process.

I also don’t see that participation in both communities is mutually exclusive. Far from it. I think a lot of people can and should offer things to both communities, strengthening both products. We need to move away from and avoid “us” versus “them” and accept what we do have. Complain about it if you must, be willing to accept what is, is.

CI is a great tool. It looks like Kohana will be as well.

In the meantime, I’m happy to have any great tool freely at my disposal.

It is silly, please stop - to anyone who is thinking of writing ‘Yet Another Pissed Off Post’.

CI is brilliant. That is why we are here.

It is the product of one gifted person with a clear vision. The result is a nearly perfect design with simple, consistent coding. No community has created anything like it.

Hey, Christmas only comes once a year, but I kinda like it that way.

Thanks for everyone.
Yes, CI is great; because I like it, I give my question; I am sorry if this question let you feel uncomfortable.
Please calmly think this problem, maybe it will give our CI a little useful.
Anyway, thanks.

No matter what you think about this whole roadmap, feature and fork discussions. Discussions like this will cost CI alot of new and old users I am afraid. It should be in everybodys interest to stop that I think.

Derek. I think you should think about a solution for this. Those discussions will come up again and again. Maybe you can add a sticky with FAQ which clarifies everything. For example “CI does not have a roadmap cause…”, “CI was developed cause”, “we build CI from EE cause…”

The project has gotten so popular, that it would be fair to inform all users what they can expect oder cannot expect from this framework.

Greetings Jan

No really a rant, just a bit of frustration. You just wonder what’s the best thing to do, people have created amazing extensions to CI, which may or may not be integrated in the next version. Probably that’s the way to go. I was just wishing that we could be have a little more information about the direction and vision of this little great gem that was gifted to us by the very bright Rick Ellis. Just to save the effort of spinng off and dispersing energy in tens of clones, which we may all create, but to what point?

We do love the product and are fully committed to it, so sorry if I have upset or offended anyone, I don’t see how this discussion can cost evergy and users, as you may ignore it and get on with your work, or put in your thoughts. As I stated on many many occasions, CI is the best thing that has happened to us (at Keepthinking at least) in a very long time, one that changed radically the way we think and we develop things. For this very reason, as I care for and love it, I’d like to know what will happen to it. It is far to say that EllisLab owns it, but at the same time when you give something like this to the community, I feel that you kind of put yourself in the strange position of creating expectations. I cannot see why sharing a bit of information about your plans for the product is so difficult and the wrong thing to ask. Not a full roadmap, maybe, not even milestones or dates. Just what are you doing with it. Derek has probably said it already: they don’t know.

I should reinstate it. CI is great and a great gift. But like any lovely baby, we care for its future and would like to see it as a grown up

Thanks, Cristiano

@Martin: No problem my friend.  We all love CI, and that’s why we’re so passionate.  I would add that I, and Rick, and Derek Jones and Paul, are all volunteer just as any of you are.

The question of the roadmap comes up from time to time, and when it does, and when I see it, I try to answer it, but my answer is always the same.  In the interest of open-communication, here’s some of the logic in why we don’t publish roadmaps.

What IF I said that for its next version in 6 weeks CodeIgniter was planning to have a fully integrated credit card library?  What if?  The only reason I would say that is if we did intend on doing it.  Know what would happen?  Developers would say “cool” and start building around that.  Then if we didn’t deliver in 6 weeks (it doesn’t matter why) then people would get mad.  “My client is counting on that and you promised it!”  And even if we did deliver, there is nothing that says that our version would meet your needs, and now you’ve lost 6 weeks development time, and the community is deprived of another good creditcard alternative. 

The classic example here is user-authentication.  There have been some very insightful discussions on these forums about what such a system should include… inevitably its too much for some, and not enough for others - and that’s why we say “always, without exception, make decisions regarding a framework based on what’s currently available and not plans.”

I know this isn’t ideal for everyone, but its the way we work - and we actively encourage others to bend, mold and otherwise force their will on CodeIgniter until it works for them.  One thing nobody can deny this community’s collective dedication and passion.