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Greetings Folks!

I had signed up on Daniweb many years ago but never bothered to seriously post until now. Only when the "social networks" of the world like Reddit and Quora and Twitter started disappointing me beyond the usual excruciating limits did I decide to explore some other programming forums on the Interwebs where open and good faith interaction still seems to exist.

After coming to know that Daniweb uses the very same web programming stack which also happens to be my favorite (Bootstrap + jquery + CodeIgniter), I am starting to have a sense that I might be in the right place! No offense to all the shiny new PHP and JS frameworks out there which get discussed ad-nauseum every single day, but CodeIgniter still has some advantages today which are hard to beat, especially if you're building a small to medium sized web project in PHP:

  1. Small Footprint (about 2-3 MBs of core framework code).
  2. Bells and Whistles included (Routing, MVC, Database interaction, form building, etc.)
  3. Integration with Composer/Packagist.
  4. Proven to be solid for over a decade across the industry.

I mean what else do you need in a web framework? This should fit the bill for almost every web project under the Sun unless you're a supersonic Google or Facebook or Microsoft that is!

Thank you everyone for being such a great community, looking forward to some happy interactions on this network.

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Dani commented: You forgot to mention it’s MVC but it doesn’t throw it down your throat +34
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I've posted my story many times before, but here it is again :)

I've been programming the majority of my life, first in Apple BASIC, then QBasic, then Visual Basic, then C++. PHP was my first foray into web development, and DaniWeb was my first project. DaniWeb started 22 years ago with phpBB, and then evolved to vBulletin. I knew the phpBB code backwards, forwards, and inside out, and wrote a ton of mods for it. Alas, I wanted something more robust, and so switched to vBulletin 3. I created the first vB SEO plugin which gained some amount of popularity. I was pretty well known within the vBulletin community back in the day. Then When vBulletin 3.x was sold, the next evolution was either to migrate to Xenforo or to vBulletin 4. Both would have been migrations to completely different frameworks that would have resulted in having to port all of my many mods.

I decided it would have taken just as long to port everything as write something from scratch. So began my first ever app, which I tackled with the assistance of Narue, a DaniWeb member with a lot of experience in C++ but not so much in web development.

I was burned out by the experience of having my code so reliant on the framework I was using (first phpBB, then vBulletin), and was looking for a framework that was more lightweight. At the time, both Codeigniter, Yii, and Laravel were all popular, and so I went with the one which was the simplest, most lightweight, and let you code however you wanted and kept out of your way as much as possible. In other words, the functionality was there if you needed/wanted it, but you weren't forced into anything in particular. I really liked that at the time.

Then when DaniWeb Connect was written, I wrote that from scratch by rolling an ORM library on top of Codeigniter I was really proud of. Eventually, I rewrote all of DaniWeb onto that same framework. That's where DaniWeb lives today.

Here are some really interesting discussions about PHP and, more specifically, Codeigniter, that I've contributed to over the years. They kind of show my journey/evolution with the CI framework:

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That's a very fascinating journey, Dani. The early era of the Internet was very different, bulletin boards and IRC were phenomenal, especially when it came to quality of interaction. It's a great achievement that you not only used to be a part but also helped build parts of that Internet.

As the PHP creator himself once said, CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that feels the least like a framework and to a great extent, that holds true today also. In the end, it is just feeble wrappers on top of core PHP objects like $_SESSION, $_POST, etc. With a framework like CodeIgniter, you're much more "near" to the spirit of core PHP than with something like Laravel or Symfony.

Thanks for the discussion links pertaining to CodeIgniter, those are a goldmine! Looking forward to more interaction on this forum, you guys are really doing great.

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Have you played around at all with jQuery 4 yet?

commented: jQuery 3.x does almost every basic thing I need such as DOM querying, event handling, AJAX requests, etc. Never felt the need to upgrade TBH. +3
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