A recent professional development caused me to give CodeIgniter a second glance and I think I’m beginning to see what I missed the first time around.  As I began to go through the documentation and play around with the code I realized that because I had already been very deeply involved in RoR and CakePHP their paradigms had colored my vision.  Both have a very ridged, “My way or the High way” feel.  People tend to phrase it something like, “convention over configuration”. I felt comfortable with that.  It meant a lot of things I just plain and simple didn’t have to worry about!

CodeIgniter doesn’t do that.  The first time I tried CodeIgniter I felt this was indicative of incompleteness or lack of power.  Wow, what a mistake!  It is true that CodeIgnitor does not FORCE you to do things in one particular way.  It’s also true that it will allow you to do things just about any way you want.  ANY WAY YOU WANT.  That’s pretty cool.  If you want to do strict mvc (like RoR or CakePHP) you can.  Or you could drop the model entirely if you wanted. No sweat.  As I really looked at what that meant it hit me suddenly.  That’s freedom!  That’s flexibility.  And it comes at a very small cost in terms of aditional configuration (read nearly non existant.).  Some things (like setting up a form to insert data) are a tad more complicated, but nothing to speak of.  And you gain so much!

And when I say “so much” I’m looking beyond just flexibility and freedom.  The way CodeIgniter handles loading things like helpers, models and views allows you to load as much or as little as you need very, very easily.  Beyond the flexibility that opens up some serious performance gains, since it’s as easy to load as not to load, so you might as well leave it out till you need it!

One final point worth mentioning is documentation.  While both RoR and Cake have made serious gains in documentation and both have a really strong community surrounding them, I can’t stand the official documentation.  CodeIgniter has AMAZING docs that are both thorough and easy to read.  It’s been a while since I experienced that!

Now, I’m just getting my feet wet, and I’m by no means saying I’m ditching my old friends RoR and Cake, but I have some revelatory experiences with CodeIgniter. You can bet I’ll be throwing it at a couple of projects in the near future.

Just when I was about to give up and go back to svn, I discovered that some saint had made a Tiger Git Installer!  Just down load and run it and your are all set.  Just the way a Mac App should work.

By the way, if you haven’t already, you’ll have to add “/usr/local/bin” to your $PATH variable to make it work.  That’s not too hard, of course.  If you use bash (as most Mac OS users do) open terminal, and enter:

vi ~/.bash_login

Hit the “i” key on your keyboard to enter editing mode, then, at the very end, add:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

Then save and exit (i.e. hit “esc”, then type “:qw” without the quotes). Finaly, in terminal do this:

. ~/.bash_login

That’s it!  You should now be able to type git --version in terminal and have it spit some thing like git version 1.5.3.1. Happy Source Controlling!

Family Fellowship is an organization concerned with making the internet a safe, family friendly place through effective, user-friendly Web Filtering.  They approached us to build a new website to market their custom web filtering product, as well as publish useful information to help families and other individuals and organizations make the most of their internet service.

FamilyFellowship.com

What We Did:

Because Family Fellowship had been unsatisfied with their previouse development teams, extra atention was given to design quality and comunication.  To help them achive thier goals for this project we:

• Produced a number of designs for them to choose from, customizing the final one to fit their needs
• Used the chosen design to create a custom theme for the Drupal CMS
• Created custom modules for Drupal to allow integration with Family Fellowship’s filtering service, Affiliate Marketing Service and with Authorize.net Recurring Billing System
• Custom System for dealing with delinquent accounts

Valente Lane Candles(VLC) is a company that makes amazing scented candles, by hand.  VLC wanted to expand their reach by creating a unique, atractive website to market their candles to the world at large.

Valente Lane Candles

What we Did

To achieve their goal, here’s what we:

• Created a world class design that fit with the nature of the product.  Lots of white space, and clean lines.
• Designed a custom candle builder.  Users pick the wax, jar and fragrance they want for their candles.
• A custom shopping cart to accommodate the non static nature of the inventory.  Includes an order tracking module.
• A custom rss parser to integrate VLC’s Blog
• A news and announcement component
• Script.aculo.us effects to smooth the user experience