I’ve been working lately on setting up an admin with CodeIgniter, which I picked because a) it’s fast, b) it’s not huge and c) it’s popular enough to have good documentation and forums, etc.  I was really pleased with how easy it was to just drop the files in place, change a few settings and it was working.  Figuring out the “right” way to do things once it’s set up, however, is proving to be more challenging…but only because it’s unfamiliar.  Once I learn the “right” way, I’m like “oh, yeah that makes sense.” I haven’t had to really learn a new framework since I spent a month figuring out the intricacies of Fusebox 4.0 (and learning MVC at the same time), but I guess once you’ve built stuff as MVC it’s all pretty much just syntax differences and learning where stuff is and what’s available. :)

I really like how CodeIgniter makes session management easy…you don’t have to worry about all the session_start()s and such, and setting up a basic authentication system took about 15 minutes with some help from a tutorial.  Although I’d like to modify it to make it so the session expires if the browser window is closed… /makes note on TODO list. :D

Also, database stuff seems pretty easy too, and I like how simple it is to run a query with parameters…you basically just write your SQL with some ?’s, and pass that string with an array of values to the db object.  No funkiness with escaping quotes, stripping stuff out for SQL injection, binding or anything…very clean and simple.

I like clean and simple. :)