News
CodeIgniter Community Voice - Elliot Haughin
EllisLab is blessed with two of the greatest communities that can be found anywhere on the internet in ExpressionEngine and more recently CodeIgniter. Despite being a relative newcomer to the scene, the people attracted to CodeIgniter are among the smartest, most talented and down-to-earth developers around today. From time to time we want to highlight some of these talented people, and we’ve asked them to lend their voice to ours. Have your voice. I hope you enjoy what they have to say as much as I did.
This week, our Community Voice author is Elliot Haughin who discovered CodeIgniter in 2006 and instantly became a huge fan of its DRY-MVC-OO-MATYCSASA (More Acronyms Than You Can Shake A Stick At) - sleek, efficient, and (worryingly) sexy coding practices. He went on to produce a series of coding screencasts dedicated to exploring the power and simplicity of the CodeIgniter Framework. He loves peppercorn sauce, once trained for 3 years to become a ninja in the hope of being accepted into a nin-ternship (a very secret and dangerous ninja internship)‚ (It didn’t work), and has never visited the north pole without a wooly hat.
What follows is a voice recording and transcript of Elliot’s thoughts on what attracted him to CodeIgniter.
CodeIgniter is a heck of a can opener
CodeIgniter is one of those things that just does a job perfectly. Take for example, the humble can opener. Whilst there may be a few other ways to open a can of tuna, the can opener just ‘works’ it serves a simple, yet extremely efficient purpose, and does its job with perfection.
CodeIgniter is exactly that. A can opener.
It’s a lightweight, efficient, full-featured web application framework that’s flexible enough to use for any type of web app. It’s built from ground-up with just one purpose - to make our lives easy; without sacrificing functionality, speed, or flexibility.
If most of your web applications share functionality across the board, you wouldn’t rewrite all that functionality for every one of them would you? - It’d be a ridiculous waste of time. CI is basically the skeleton for all my web applications. And instead of spending my time creating core functionality, I can spend my time building application level functionality.
When I first install CodeIgniter, I take 1 minute to configure a few settings, and then I’m away coding how the web application will work. Rapid is very much an understatement.
I’ve used CodeIgniter to build a basic content management system, an Enterprise Level XML-RPC based backend, a file mangement system, a blog, a photo gallery, a forum, a recruitment site… you name it, CodeIgniter just ‘fits’.
I don’t think I’d ever go back to development without CodeIgniter. It’s saved me hundreds in headache pills, and will probably continue to save me thousands more.
Posted by Derek Allard on June 09, 2008
