News
CPA Site Solutions touts CI
CPA Site Solutions just put out this Press Release that touts CodeIgniter. They used it to create their new email marketing system.
And I quote:
“We evaluated several frameworks for PHP web application development. Many of them could have worked, but they really tried to lock you in to their way of doing things,” explains Bob Rayl, Chief Technology Officer at CPA Site Solutions. “They did not offer the flexibility we need to accomplish some of the heavily proprietary functionality we bundle into our systems.”
As part of the original article they also state that CI helped cut their development time.
If you have used CodeIgniter for a project that you think deserves a mention email Marcus
Posted by Marcus Neto on December 20, 2011
PHP Framework Usage Survey
A PHP framework usage survey has been created with our community in mind. Though not strictly limited to CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine developers, the questions are particularly relevant to you. The anonymous survey is very brief—just seven questions—and should take no more than five minutes or so to complete. The survey is open immediately and will remain open over the weekend.
We quickly discovered after opening the survey that Survey Monkey has a setting to enable “Other” as an option in addition to providing the “Other” box. This results in requiring you to make a valid selection in addition to filling in your own response. If you need to fill in your own response, go ahead and select an item from the list in addition to your answer for “Other”, and we will remove the selected item from the results. We are unable to edit that option as the survey has already begun collecting data, and we do apologize for any inconvenience this causes.
Thanks for participating!
Posted by Derek Jones on December 09, 2011
Sky Clerk
What can you tell us about the team that built skyclerk.com?
Skyclerk is a product of Cloudmanic Labs, once a consulting firm, now more of a product company. Currently, we are a 5-person team: 2 designers, 2 programmers, and a content person. Our team is simply amazing. We have a love of strong design, from the UI to the code. We spend much time looking at different products on the market and have a great deal of internal debate on how we could make things better. While the resumes of the team are impressive, our real secret sauce is our deeply shared passion to always make super high quality products.
What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?
Our main mission is to make small business bookkeeping simple, fast, and engaging. Skyclerk started out many years ago as an internal tool. Most bookkeeping products were just too complex, slow, and annoying to work with. In our non-skyclerk days often someone would take an entire day off of work each month just to do bookkeeping. Also, not every small business owner has a masters degree in accounting (at times it seems you need one for other solutions).
Everyday we focus on finding new ways to make bookkeeping even more straight forward and seamless. Currently we don’t provide all the bells and whistles other bookkeeping packages provide, so our customers tend to be smaller companies, often no bigger than 10 people. Our customers are anyone from a web designer, to a small law firm, to pool cleaners. We have customers all over the world, the UK and Brazil being our top countries outside of the United States.
What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?
Flexibility. We played around with all the other PHP frameworks, and always felt confined to doing things by the framework’s rules; very hard to expand. Some of them seemed too bloated. Before we discovered CodeIgniter we set out to write our own framework, with which Skyclerk was originally written. We were having internal debates on open sourcing our framework but the extra hard work of documenting it and adding the extra polish needed for public consumption seemed like a lot of overhead for a small company. One day we stumbled on CodeIgniter from a Google search of well documented frameworks. After looking at its guts, we realized CodeIgniter was where we were striving to be. We shortly killed our framework and have been a CodeIgniter shop ever since. So fast, so not bloated, so expandable. Perfect for what we value in a code base.
What is next on the plate for skyclerk.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?
At Cloudmanic we break our time up into what we call a 60/20/20 rule. We spend 60% of our time bettering our current features and product offering. This 60% comes mainly from user feedback. We have engaged users, who are always happy to tell us what they like and dislike. 20% of our time is spend building new features. Sometimes we build features from market demand and sometimes we build features we just internally really want. The last 20% is spent building new random things, for which we do not require a reason. The interest or passion of a team member is all that is needed, and all that matters. Sometimes these ideas flop. Sometimes it turns into some open source tools we release, and sometimes they become brand new products.
We have spend a great deal of time on our mobile apps (Android is released, and iPhone will be release soon). Invoicing is coming very soon, as well as some pretty cool integrations with other software providers.
Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community? Tips from this project you’d like to share? Lessons you’ve learned?
Take bets. I think this goes for any sort of software development. If you have an idea of how to do something better, just go for it. You might hit a dead-end or you might discover an amazing new way of doing something. Either way, the learnings will improve your software development. In the past we just followed the conventional wisdom. Often times via little bets we find better ways to build more scalable software.
Also, as a software team we build software on a no schedule bases. We do not have timeline or due dates. We never take shortcuts. Allowing the team freedom to dedicate as much time as necessary to build the best product possible is one of the worthiest development lessons we have learned. Oddly enough we get things done pretty quickly. The stress of a deadline just clouds judgement.
Lastly, we live in an Open Source world. Read through other people’s code. We have learned so much by simply checking out random code from Github and reading through it. The more tricks you have in your bag the better.
Posted by Marcus Neto on December 05, 2011
CodeIgniter 2.1.0 Belated Release Announcement
Since the announcement of CodeIgniter moving to GitHub three months ago at CICON2011 we’ve seen the community thrive. CodeIgniter quickly climbed the rankings on GitHub’s Most Watched PHP Projects page all the way up to 4th place at time of writing, we’ve had contributions from 77 developers, merged over 100 pull requests and we still have plenty more to go.
Instead of simply continuing the 2.0.x branch CodeIgniter is now on 2.1.x which not only signifies the impact of our contributions but reflects some bigger changes that have been added since the last version:
1. Migrations - version your database schema with simple up() and down() methods.
2. PDO Database Driver - CodeIgniter now supports PDO which opens up the number of Database engines you can use significant.
3. More PHP 5 syntax - since removing support for PHP 4 we’ve been deleting old PHP 4 code and replacing it with much quicker PHP 5 code.
These are a few of the largest changes but 2.1 brings a huge number of other changes which are all listed in the changelog.
With the move to Git and GitHub the EllisLab Team and the Engineers can support branches and multiple version management much easier. This means that while we work on fixing bugs in the stable 2.1 branch we can work on big new features such as HMVC and the integration of Sparks, along with some great ideas we’ll announce at a later date. All changes and bug fixes going into 2.1.x will be merged with 3.0 (the develop branch) as we go, so no work is being duplicated in development time. This simple means we need you to pick which branch to send your pull request to: bugs in 2.1 and new features in 3.0.
Other things waiting until the 3.0 release are the new User Guide and the change of license to OSL. These are some large changes which require time to finish up perfectly and the User Guide certainly is a work in progress. 3.0 will be a few months away so there is lots of time to get it perfect and you will all have a chance to help out on GitHub.
In the mean time we certainly suggest you upgrade. CodeIgniter 2.1 is a better, more stable, more useful version of 2.0 which should be perfectly compatible with your existing 2.0.x applications.
Posted by Phil Sturgeon on November 28, 2011
Get Ambassador
This showcase is with Nick Schwab the Technical Diplomat (CTO) for GetAmbassador.com a new Social Referral platform.
What can you tell us about the team that built getambassador.com?
We’re a team of 3 fresh out of the TechStars New York program - two web developers (myself and Cody Christian) building the platform while Jeff Epstein hustles on the business side. Cody and I each have over 7 years of PHP experience, 3 years of CodeIgniter experience, and have been building websites for over 10 years. In addition, Jeff and I both bring experience from capitalized exits from previous internet companies to the team.
What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?
Ambassador is a social referral platform to allow any company to get more users by rewarding their existing ones for referring their friends. We realized that many companies have built the same basic referral architecture for their websites and we wanted to break the chain of repetition by building a simple SaaS platform which manages the architecture at large scale. Not only do we save companies time and money with our full-scale referral platform, but we also deliver insights into the referral behavior and true value of their customers through an elegant dashboard. Ambassador is free for consumers who want to create a profile of their favorite brands to start earning rewards and we offer a variety of service plans for businesses who want to use our platform to power their referral program.
What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?
We wanted a framework with great documentation and excellent modulation through the MVC approach. Naturally, CodeIgniter was a perfect fit. Additional factors included the liveliness of the CodeIgniter community (and some of the great 3rd party contributions they’ve made) and the framework’s support of custom libraries to allow us to easily build a version-controlled API.
What is next on the plate for getambassador.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?
We’re building more integrations into 3rd party applications to make it as easy as possible for companies to get started using our platform and we’re always building out more insights for companies so they can get a better look at the referral influence of their customers.
Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community?
We’re hiring great developers to help us build out the platform and integrate with 3rd parties. If you’re a programming prodigy who likes to solve complex relational problems, we should chat.
Tips from this project you’d like to share? Lessons you’ve learned?
Leverage the community. There are excellent libraries contributed by some talented developers which allow you to build faster.
Always build in modules. If (and when) the product changes, you’ll be thankful you did.
Routes are your friend, especially when building a product with a versioned API.
Iterate. Start with a proof of concept - a minimal viable product - and test your assumptions before building features you might not actually need.
Posted by Marcus Neto on November 15, 2011
