CodeIgniter
The CodeIgniter Community has been crying out for EllisLab and the development team to be more open and forward with information, developments, roadmaps, etc and EllisLab have taken this to heart. Yesterday they put up a "nightly build" of the new documentation which has been worked on in a GitHub branch for months and is not in develop and... the community said AAAAGGGGHHHHHHH! This post is an explanation of why the new documentation is amazing.
With CodeIgniter moving to GitHub we are starting to see a lot of CodeIgniter developers wanting to learn more about Git, specifically how they can use it to improve their workflows, manage their applications and move away from the horrible days of copying and pasting updated libraries off a wiki. UCK. Sparks are helping us on the whole, but there is another method that we can use to manage our packages: Git Submodules.
CICON2011 happened and it was awesome. We had 100 CodeIgniter nerds in the same place - which is the biggest collection of nerds since CICON2010 in the UK, but this event was so much better. We had a whole load of announcements that have changed the way the framework is contributed to and improved the whole community for the better. This is not me blowing smoke up my backside, but feedback I have had from attendees. So, what did you miss?
The CodeIgniter Community has decided to have a little holiday this summer, and head to New York for not just a meet up, but the biggest gathering of CodeIgniter developers to ever happen. There will be talks from the CodeIgniter Reactor Engineers, the EllisLab teams themselves and people involved in Forrst, PyroCMS, PHPFog and all sorts of other exciting things. There will be masterclasses teaching you the basics if you are pretty new to CodeIgniter, or an advanced track showing you how to do some crazy stuff. Something for everyone!
Tonight I started working on the RESTful API for PancakeApp - an invoicing system built in CodeIgniter - when I remembered how many people have been asking for help using REST_Controller. I wrote up an article on NetTuts last year hoping that would cover the majority of questions, but with new features like API Keys, Limiting and Logging being added I thought a quick run-through was in order. This video covers the basic implementation, HTTP Basic/Digest authentication, format switching and goes onto the new API Key and logging features. As this is an admittedly an unplanned video I'll be accepting answers to the question "How many mistakes did I make?" on the back of a postcard.
What makes Reactor so much more different than CodeIgniter has been in the past? Anyone can be involved wether you are a hard-core developer who is happy to jump into the codebase and start changing things and adding features, or a new user who just wants to request some new features, you can do this on the UserVoice or send in your code using BitBucket and GitHub.
Two weeks ago we had some interesting news from EllisLab about the planning of a "Official CodeIgniter Community Branch" in which "CodeIgniter Deputies" would be appointed to manage community contributions. That was pretty awesome, but today we've had some even better news about the future of CodeIgniter. That is: The CodeIgniter Reactor!
Times have been hard for the developers of CodeIgniter - EllisLab and they have addressed this in a few ways: A spot on the ExpressionEngine Podcast, a few articles explaining the future of EllisLab and ExpressionEngine and how they plan to take things forward. Sadly, as always us CodeIgniter developers have been left with not much more than a nod and a pat on the head.
People have always said my Template library for CodeIgniter is powerful but f**king confusing. Well now I have written up some documentation, which anybody who knows me or my work is VERY unusual...
