On PHPMaster.com today there's a new post from Daniel Gafitescu that compares CodeIgniter (an "old standby" in the PHP framework world) and Laravel, a relative newcomer. The article is broken up into a few different categories, with some sample code included to illustrate.

n the beginning of my career I stumble upon CodeIgniter and I love it for its simplicity, small footprint, and good documentation. [...] But last year, because of the Twitter buzz from some in the PHP community, blog posts, and the suggestions of some friends, I give Laravel 3 a try - and since that time I've never looked back. So, in this article I'd like to present a comparison of the two frameworks from my point of view.

He compares the two frameworks based on things like the requirements to get them installed, how they handle creating REST APIs, the general organization of their code (and your code using them) as well as command line support. There's a "miscellaneous" section that talks about some of the smaller differences and a (very) brief mention of the communities for each.

New on PHPMaster.com there's a tutorial by Rakhitha Nimesh about using the multi-language support to CodeIgniter applications. This functionality is included as a default part of the framework using internal language files.

Multi-language support, also known as internationalization, is a key feature of modern web applications. Most of the full-stack PHP frameworks come with multi-language support which enables us to dynamically present our application's interface in different languages without duplicating the existing source code for each language. Today we're going to discuss how we can enable multiple languages using CodeIgniter as well as a few tricks to customize the core functionality.

He shows where in the configuration to set the default language and where you'll need to put the language files so CodeIgniter can find them. Sample code shows how to load in the language files and how to pass certain values out to the view for display. He also includes an example of using CodeIgniter's own hooks system to call the language file load via a "LanguageLoader" class after the controller instance is created.

In his latest post Phil Sturgeon shares some thoughts in response to this article from Shawn McCool about the "death of CodeIgniter", citing a few specific points.

I have referenced Shawn McCool's blog a few times, "Why CodeIgniter is Dead" and people are wondering why I argued so hard against it back in May but then gave CodeIgniter such a hard time in my last article. For the record I'm not team CodeIgniter or team Laravel, I'm a PHP user who has some opinions, and some of those opinions change over time - which is fair enough.

He goes through several of Shawn's points including:

• Comments about best practices in CI (or lack of)
• Modularity/design pattern use
• The implementation of modules/sparks
• The community contributions to the Reactor project
• Dropping PHP4 support

Phil also notes that, just because something isn't making significant progress, it doesn't mean it's dead in the water:

Dead insinuates being closed right down. Repo removed, or just nothing is ever tagged again. Where CodeIgniter sits is closer to Smarty. Smarty is still active and has it's last stable release 2 months ago. It just hasn't changed much in years and probably never will.

Andrew Podner has an introductory post to one of the more popular PHP frameworks (and one that's been around for a long time) - CodeIgniter.

I decided to pick CodeIgniter back up and start really trying to learn the ins and outs of it. I was pleasantly surprised that overall, it is pretty simple to use and whenever you want to do something, the first question to ask yourself should be "Let me check the user guide and see if there is a library or helper for this before I write it". Chances are, the answer has already been thought of and exists in the framework.

The post is pretty high level and describes the parts of the MVC structure (Model/View/Controller) and how they relate to the features that CodeIgniter has to offer. For more information about this framework (and downloads) check out codeigniter.com.

Constantin Bosneaga has a recent post to his site that the CodeIgniter users out there could find helpful. It's an example of using the Layout pattern in a CI app to make a more flexible layout thanks to a library (source included in the post).

CodeIgniter is great framework by its simplicity. But when I moved from CakePHP, I really missed layout pattern. CodeIgniter documentations offers this way to include non-changing site header and footer. For sure it isn't flexible and does not show page structure in a clear way. For many years I use layout pattern. Layout describes whole page as a template with blocks for header, menu, content, etc.

He uses this library to handle the data for your layout, including the header items (like CSS, Javascript) and the definition of a global template. It also allows you to do template inheritance, making it simpler to reuse partial templates ("blocks").

On the CodeIgniter blog there's a new announcement about a book published from one of the main CodeIgniter developers (Jaime Rumbelow) - the second volume in the CI Handbook series.

Earlier this year I wrote and released The CodeIgniter Handbook - Vol. 1 - Who Needs Ruby? to critical acclaim. It's been several months since the release of Volume One and everybody's support, feedback and enthusiasm has been absolutely wonderful. To everyone who has purchased a copy, thank you. I'm thrilled to announce that Vol. 2 - API Design, was released last week and is now available to purchase in PDF or Paperback.

This new book covers API design and how you can make your app "connected" in an automated world. If you'd like to pick up a copy of this new book, you can get one from efendi books.

In a new post to his site, Phil Sturgeon has a wrapup of CICONF (the CodeIgniter conference) that just finished in San Francisco:

This year the low-to-middle budget CodeIgniter Conference was held in San Francisco in a brilliant co-working space called Citizen Space. I didn't know at the time but this space is actually a partner of New Work City, the venue for CICON2011, so it was great to "keep it in the family".

He goes on to talk about some of the speakers that were at the even and gives summaries of the sessions as they were given. Topics included Paas (PagodaBox, specifically), Chef, Varnish, RESTful APIs and productivity with the CI framework. If you weren't able to attend, you can find slides and some videos of the event posted on its Lanyrd page.

In this new post to PHPMaster.com they continue their look at aspect-oriented programming with CodeIgniter. In part one they introduced some of the fundamentals of AOP and in this new article, they dig deeper with more practical examples.

In the previous part of this series we learned what Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is and the meaning of important AOP terminology. In this part I'll explain why we need AOP using practical examples and how to add AOP behavior to your PHP application using the CodeIgniter framework.

They start with a look at a few pieces of functionality that could cut across multiple parts of the application like logging or authentication/authorization. They show how to use the "hooks" feature of CodeIgniter to implement the AOP proxy class generation, executing pre- and post-controller.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial posted that wants to guide you through the world of aspect-oriented programming with a CodeIgniter application as a base.

Have you ever heard of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) before? It's a widely used concept in developing enterprise level systems, although it hasn't seen much use in PHP. I'm going to use this article as an opportunity to introduce PHP developers to AOP. This tutorial will be delivered to you as a 3-part series. In this part I'll explain the concepts of AOP. In part 2 I'll show you the practical uses of AOP and creating a AOP rules structure. Finally, I'll show you how to integrate AOP functionality using CodeIgniter in part 3.

Since this is just part one, they mainly focus on some of the key points of AOP like aspects, advice, jointpoint and pointcuts. For each, there's brief descriptions for the types and, for some, code samples showing the idea in action.

For those interested in getting started with the CodeIgniter framework, but want a more step-by-step guide to getting it up and running, this recent post from Mayank Kandpal can help.

Every other day, I develop new websites from scratch for various clients and sometimes for some of my own projects. Unless the project is really complex, I prefer to develop in CodeIgniter, a super-flexible (MVC) PHP framework which lets me develop super-quick !

He walks you through all the steps you'll need - from downloading the latest to creating the application and things like setting up logging and authentication.