Derek Allard has a new post to his blog today sharing five things about CodeIgniter you might not know - things he's discovered in his CI work over the past few years.

Every time I start a new project with CodeIgniter I find myself tasked with something, often a small thing, that I’ve never "solved" before. I try to use these moments as opportunities to explore PHP and CodeIgniter a little bit deeper. Often times I surprise myself by learning something new, or surprise myself at having forgotten something relatively "basic". Here are 5 things I've discovered or rediscovered in the last few years. If you're a CI veteran, some of these will be old news to you, and some might be new.

Here's his list of five handy tips:

• There is an optional second parameter in $this->uri->segment()
• Any library can have a configuration file
• remove_invisible_characters()
• CodeIgniter 2 allows for libraries to have drivers
• Views can be returned as data with a third parameter

You can find out more about the CodeIgniter framework on its website.