I read an article recently about the Top Ten PHP frameworks that listed the frameworks in order of popularity (although I’m not sure of the source of that data) and outlined some of their strengths.

I’ve used a few of the frameworks on the list to some extent or another (3 out of the top 4) and whilst there are definitely things I like about front runners Laravel and Symfony there are times when I wonder if they’re a bit over complicated for the majority of web development.

As well as what are probably the big two these days, I’ve also used Slim (mostly for building APIs), which I enjoyed using and I’ve also used CodeIgniter.

One interesting thing about this article is that it paints CodeIgniter in quite a good light. In my experience the developers who use it a lot really like it, and everyone else tends to look down on it for being a bit too flexible. I can understand the concern, but that flexibility can be really powerful if treated with respect.

One thing I do particularly like about CodeIgniter is that it doesn’t use a templating language. PHP already is essentially a templating language, so why introduce the overhead of another one?

Btw, I’ve seen this trick on some other webpages that I enjoy reading (particularly recently CSS Tricks) where they have brief articles that send you off elsewhere. As I start to withdraw from social media it looks like an interesting way to share other content that I find across the interwebs. So that’s what this is and I’ll probably be doing it more.

Photo credit: Z-tec on Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-SA