I used my first PHP framework today, CodeIgniter, and I secretly loved it.
Saving poor developers' sanity
I felt the need to keep my delight under wraps as if I has told my boss how much easier creating dynamic web systems is now going to be, they might not appreciate me as much!
Up until now, I always mistakingly thought of such frameworks as Zend, CakePHP, etc as requiring special servers or too proprietary to be able to use in my everyday work.
A fellow coder today put me onto CodeIgniter, which is an open-source PHP framework. It runs on PHP4 enabled servers and should run on most cheap rental server web hosting. MySQL support is built-in and you have the ability to change what database you will run. Countless time-saving features and extendability options exist, as does a thriving support community.
What CodeIgniter really allows me to do is build an MVC Object-Oriented PHP web system in a fraction of the time it would take building from scratch. The low-level connectivity to databases, validation classes, etc are already setup for me out of the box, so I can better spend my time developing the higher-level site features and make my company happy.
Running it locally, it is supremely faster than WordPress on my USB-connected SD card under MAMP and XAMPP. Probably due to it’s caching, one of countless features of CodeIgniter.
Stay tuned for more CodeIgniter reports and tests of other frameworks as I sample them.