D3 - Devise Design Develop

I never even heard of a coding ‘framework’ until I found out about the multitude of lightweight and powerful frameworks for javascript such as jQuery and Prototype. So it goes without saying that when I found out there were some for PHP too my mind was sufficiently blown. After looking through a few different types I settled on trying one called Code Igniter because it looked to have the smallest footprint and was among the easiest to learn. There are several different reasons i’ve used CodeIgniter ever since I found out about it a few months ago. Following is a few examples of why this framework is priceless to me and my productivity. One is the structure it forces upon you (in a good way) namely the Model-View-Controller dev pattern. Right out of the box I found myself writing code more segmented and documented, which is excellent for those functions that are reusable in future projects like image processing and user logging. Also I love the way the URLs are designed to be search-engine and human friendly right out of the box. For example instead of a URL like artwork.php?piece=23&order=ASC it could end up more like /artwork/23/asc/. One thing I’ve noticed regarding this URL rewriting is that it makes it a little bit more challenging to integrate it into other script packages like WordPress that have their own rewriting method. Finally, there’s a ton of common functions, classes and helpers that range from form validation to email to sessions. It’s all been battle tested and works as you would expect them to every time. I apologize for how broad this is but it’s just too huge of a reason to explain in detail, if you’re interested in reading more about these there’s a detailed user manual online here and it’s all in HTML so it’s also included in the zip when you download the framework. I’ve created about 6 sites with this framework and can’t count the number of times I was able to go back to a previous site and reuse a function that not only saved me time in development but also in testing because it was all done already. All in all I think the fact that I feel I’m more productive, efficient and create all around cleaner and more documented code is the reason I love using this framework the most.