Having previously struggled with the documentation (or lack thereof) for the CakePHP Framework, looked briefly at Zend and even dabbled with Ruby On Rails (not knowing much about the underlying language – Ruby – I decided this wasn’t my best in-road to MVC), it was finally CodeIgniter which served as my first real introduction to web frameworks and the Model/View/Controller way of doing things.

CodeIgniter is an open source web application framework

I’m naturally hesitant to put something on a pedestal and evangelise without having truly sampled the alternatives – maybe Cake starts to teach itself after the first hurdle… perhaps it really is worth learning a new language to unlock the power of Rails… and Zend? It could be worth more than a cursory glance – but in the past few months at least, CodeIgniter has been good to me.

After a lot of mucking about, a couple of false starts and much reading up on the excellent User Guide and wiki, CodeIgniter became the framework of choice for the latest project – Crewger.

Crewger is a networking, project management, and exhibition site tailored towards both traditional and what we like to call ‘new’ Irish filmmakers – those that, like us, see the Internet a great opportunity for film.

Crewger Logo

With this specific target, what I didn’t want to do is what I’ve done for more general online communities in the past and mould the website around a pre-built Content Management System. This certainly works in a lot of cases (I remain on good terms with the humble CMS) but for Crewger I wanted something much more flexible. I wanted to create the tool or resource which I knew should exist, not simply re-iterate whatever I can find that’s out there already.

And at the same time, why reinvent the wheel?

@davidjrice : Frameworks are the Content Management Systems of the future.

The nature of a framework like CodeIgniter, Rails or CakePHP, means it makes light work of the more common tasks while not holding your hand all the way to a finished website. Common tasks taken care of, you’re free to use your programming skills to concentrate on the not so common… all those cool things that make your application special. For someone with more imagination than patience when it comes to building new things, this one’s a no brainier.

And while I may in future look elsewhere for my framework fix — perhaps to the recent ‘more open’ fork from the CodeIgniter project, KohanaPHP — for now at least, and for Crewger, CodeIgniter is kicking ass.

The CMS is dead? Long live the Framework.