So, the plan is to develop a site with Codeigniter. I've been looking at the various PHP frameworks over the last few weeks, lured by the promise of 'rapid application development'. They don't tell you how long it will take to get your head around learning the framework.

I'm keeping this diary primarily for my benefit, so I don't just sit on hands dreamimg, and have something chart my progress. If you're a newb, you might find some of this useful. Otherwise, move on, 'cause you already know everything already, right?

My take on it all

I'm no expert on this stuff, just another self taught php guy. I think the hardest bit about frameworks is that you have to learn how they work (duh). When you write an application from scratch, at least you intimately know all your classes and methods. Adopting a framework means you have to understand how someone else put together the methods and classes. On the other hand, the people who put together the frameworks know php a whole bunch better than I do, and do some things better than I do, and provide some functionalities that I might have even bothered with, in addition taking away some of the tedium of CRUD, form validation, and other necessary evils.

I'm not even so certain that I'm completely sold on MVC - I had already been using an MVC'ish approach to recent efforts. For example, I create a class typically called PageHTML or such, and use static functions for most HTML generation. But everyone says you gotta do MVC, so here we go.

Which Framework?

There's a bunch of them. So throw a dart and choose one. I'm going with CodeIgniter. It seems to have the shortest learning curve. But it also lacks a few things that some of the other have built-in, so I had to look into some of the third party libraries to get where I'd like to go. So this install of CodeIgniter is going to incorporate 3 (to start) libraries:

• Template 1.4.1
• DX Auth
• DataMapper DMZ

Template 1.4.1 is going to help out with views, DX Auth is going to help out with authentication, and DataMapperDMZ is going to provide ORM. It can be argued that other frameworks have that functionality built in. But I'm using CodeIgniter, so that's that. A potential pitfall with some CI libraries is that they might not keep up with CodeIgniter development - the libraries I am choosing are all know to work with CodeIgniter 1.7.2.

What did I get done today?

Dreaming isn't doing. I spend alot of time dreaming up the next killer website. But dreaming doesn't get it done. Today I just sourced out a nice basic open source page layout, there's a million of them out there. Here it is after tweaking to my satisfaction. I want something realtively simple, because we have break this up into chunks that we can template without having to deal with lots of css complexity. Spent about 3 hours on it. As of now, we still don't have a CodeIgniter site, in is just dumb HTML, but this is a necessary part of things - I need to see how my different pages and going to be built in HTML before I can move them over to CI views. At the sae time I have to consider the database structure and how I will populate the various divs on this page. it will be a simple blog, check out the codeigniter tutorials for the essentials of a blog database structure.

Tommorrow

Install CodeIgniter and configure the system, then get this HTML to be served dynamically by CI and the Template Library.