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

GoCart

Every week we hear of really awesome places that CodeIgniter is being used. I want to start sharing those with the community-at-large. I will start by posting them here under a new Showcase Category with the hopes that any future revisions of CI.com will have a section for stuff like this. You guys and gals make some really cool stuff and deserve a platform to show it off.

So without further ado…

This showcase is an interview with Kyle Roseborrough about GoCart

What can you tell us about the GoCart team?

We have a pair of PHP developers who knew there was a better way to build a shopping cart. Noah (lead developer) has 6 years experience in PHP development and 4 years in CodeIgniter. Gabe has about 10 years experience in web application development.  Kyle has been working in UI and management for 10 years.

What can we tell about the site in general?

GoCartdv.com was built to showcase GoCart and offer some basic information on the system.

What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

The main audience is CodeIgniter developers who are wanting a simple, scalable, CodeIgniter shopping cart. The goal is to get people involved in development to improve the cart and allow it to fully embody the goal of the project. To be easy to customize for developers and easy to use for end users/customers

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

CodeIgniter has great documentation and is easy to learn. We build lot of custom projects on CodeIgniter and it only made sense for us to build our cart on it. When looking for commerce solutions, we never found a suitable solution built on CodeIgniter so we decided to set out to do it on our own.

What is next on the plate for GoCart?

We really want GoCart to foster a great community of people contributing back to the roadmap and path the project will take. We want the focus to remain the same though “Easy to Customize, Easy to Use”. It would be great if we could get enough people using.

Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

Well, not really. GoCart is intended to be a shopping cart, plain and simple. It does have some basic page and banner management and a whole slew of cart related features, but ultimately it’s an ecommerce platform.

Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community?

We built GoCart to be simple and scalable. As time goes on, we want the software to become easier and easier to use. We want GoCart to be scalable and to be able to work with new platforms as they come out. We feel that CodeIgniter and the CodeIgniter community is a huge benefit here. It enables developers to tie into a whole plethora of libraries, helpers and applications easily and support each other in the endeavor to make CodeIgniter better. Essentially, what’s good for CodeIgniter is good for GoCart.

Tips from this project you’d like to share?

If you really want something, do it yourself. If it doesn’t happen then you probably don’t want it as bad as you think.

Lessons you’ve learned?

- Not every idea is a good one. Generally you need someone else around to discuss ideas and methods with. Collaboration is the best way to build a good application.
- No one knows what the next trend will be.  Having a scalable platform that will adjust to a new set of tools and user demands is very important.

If you have a project that you would like to see in our showcase email me

Posted by Marcus Neto on November 05, 2011

New User Guide in Development

We are happy to announce today that the user guide has had some significant improvements, and the first commit of these changes were just pushed today.

As many of you likely heard at CICON 2011, the Reactor team has had an internal project going on for some time to move the user guide to Sphinx.  In addition to handling the tedium of generating page and document tables of contents, or maintaining internal links and references, the documentation is now easier to write, as you can simply focus on the content instead of markup and presentation.  Don’t forget syntax highlighting of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in code samples.  Based on ReStructured Text, it’s also more human readable in a text editor than HTML is, which is likely where you spend most of your time.  As an added benefit, Sphinx can output HTML, PDF, and even EPUB formats all from the same source files.  We will likely be taking advantage of that at a later date.

But we didn’t stop there, we also enlisted the thunderous powers of EllisLab’s Chief Creative Officer, James Mathias for a style redesign.  They are clean, easy to read, and beautiful.

Setting up your dev environment to work with Sphinx (if you want to render and output locally) is very easy, and takes about five minutes.  For those that want to geek out, we have added a readme file to the user guide source folder so the step by step instructions are available right from GitHub.

Today marks the first commit with the new user guide to the unreleased develop branch, so you may encounter some bumps.  Most notably are the code blocks, which pandoc lost our line breaks on, and some navigation issues as we experiment with different table of contents presentation and depth.  We’ll be cleaning these up prior to the next release (much is as simple as some line breaks and tabs), but feel free to pitch in and submit some pull requests if you see anything out of whack.

And lastly, for the first time ever, we have live nightly builds of documentation for the develop branch available at the CodeIgniter web site.  Enjoy!

Posted by Derek Jones on October 05, 2011

Upcoming Site Downtime

The EllisLab family of sites (ExpressionEngine.com, CodeIgniter.com, MojoMotor.com, and EllisLab.com) will be down for scheduled maintenance on Thursday, September 22, 2011 beginning at approximately 10-11pm Eastern and lasting a number of hours. Access to critical resources such as the store, your product downloads, and documentation will be unaffected.

Posted by Derek Jones on September 21, 2011