Code Igniter = Great!

I'm not much of a PHP coder-like a lot of people out there, I can hack something together given sufficient time and coffee. This week I was asked to take a stab at returning a formatted report based on a database query, and the thought of jumping into something like that was a little daunting. I could probably half-ass it, but I'd rather make it at least appear halfway decent. :)

Enter Code Igniter. CI's a fantastic PHP framework that really took the sting out of the whole process. It takes care of most/all the nitty gritty details and leaves me to think about the higher level stuff. There are a lot of other frameworks available for PHP, but CI stood out for me for a couple of reasons.

1. It works with PHP 4 and 5. I know I should be using 5, but not every web host makes it available. And not knowing much about our internal server config (secretive IT and all that), I couldn't chance it.
2. Easy installation. Extract one zip file, edit two files. Bingo bango, Bob's your uncle.
3. Absolutely fantastic user's manual. Probably the best I've ever seen for a web framework.
4. Your code just looks clean. There's really not much to it, and it's very easy to follow. Moreover CI makes it easy to follow the MVC Pattern, in fact CI finally made this famous pattern clear as day to me.

If you're in the market for a PHP framework or a MVC framework in general, you really need to check out Code Igniter. I know a lot of folks turn their noses up at PHP, but CI really polishes it up and I think it's worth a look.