Joseph Crawford gives you an overview of the PHP Framework, CodeIgniter. He says that the benefits of this framework are to save a lot of time and code when you want to do simple things. He thinks that the best part is that it’s based on the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern.

He delves deep into MVC and eulogizes it as a nice method to use for object oriented development. It keeps things well organized and keeps the code clean, and easy to manage. The framework is also very easy to extend. You can extend core classes or you can replace them with your own implementations. It also gives you the ability to create your own libraries and helpers. For the uninitiated, a library is a class, which you can load into CodeIgniter. Joseph also gives an example of a controller that will load a custom library and put it to use.

He also lists some issues to be solved by developers in the future. They are as follows:

• Controllers only allow 1 directory depth so you cannot have for instance controllers/dir1/dir2/dir3/controller.php.

• The database classes that CodeIgniter uses seems to very loosely use the active record pattern.
• The form validation in CodeIgniter does not handle the check boxes or radio buttons very well.