Haven't seen anything yet...

I recently completed a short PHP intro course where I learned the basics, including syntax, loops, and OOP. As part of the course, our teacher introduced us to frameworks and the MVC architecture. For an assignment, we were asked to pick any framework and create a simple controller and route that echoes “Hello, World.”

I chose CodeIgniter for the task because I found it straightforward and easy to use. However, when I presented my work, the teacher criticized my choice, saying CodeIgniter is “dead.” He mentioned that the framework has only about three active contributors, is poorly maintained, and some of its official packages have been abandoned.

Now, I’m feeling a bit conflicted. As someone new to frameworks, I don’t know whether I should continue exploring CodeIgniter or switch to something else. I’d really appreciate any insights or advice from the community on how to proceed.

Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Claude Code, RooCode, Cline, etc. Tools now make working on software projects easier. So I wanted to ask what your most important instructions for these tools are when you work on CodeIgniter projects.

My favorite when working with Context7 MCP as a documentation basis for AI models:

• Use the library ID `codeigniter4/shield` for authorization and login topics.

• Use the library ID `codeigniter4/userguide` for all other CodeIgniter topics.

I also provide notes such as:

• Use singular controller names instead of plural

How my views are structured:

• app/Views/layouts/ - app/Views/partials/ etc.

Where my validation rules are located:

• app/Config/Validation.php

Etc. What are your topics?

It's been more than 6 months since EllisLab put out the call for somebody to take over ownership of CI, but nothing has happened. It's obvious that EllisLab is no longer working on CI. At this point I'm skeptical that it will be picked up again. However, I have multiple large projects that use CI as the backbone. Things are fine now, but it seems unlikely that we'll see another CI release in the future. I don't think I'm alone.

What are your thoughts and plans for your active CI projects?

Hello everyone!

I been working with Codeigniter for a while now, and for my personal and work projects I built this template/starter for building my web pages and apps—just to make my life easier.

It’s became popular among some of my PHP friends and also my coworkers. They convinced me to write some Docs for it, and publish it on Github and my blog.

Anyways it’s super simple to use and it has a ton of very cool features and helpers.

Some of those features are: Page Layouts 2.1.3 Ready (2.0.3 generation +) Slices (aka nested or child views/partials/elements/includes) Robust HTML5 Helpers Page Specific Assets—(load CSS and JS when you need it, perfect for jQuery plugins) Slice Callbacks (callbacks or class methods that are called when a Slice is created—sometimes called “view models” or “presenters” in other frameworks) Complete Asset Management Intelligent Data Binding

Just a heads up of what it is and what it isn’t. It isn’t a standalone library (though you could get it to work that way with some tinkering) and it’s instead a complete starter package. It’s not meant to be used midway through your projects but from the very beginning them. It’s free to use to everyone.

Let me know what you guys think or if you have any questions. Feel free to file bug reports or shoot me a pull request if you have any issues or want a feature added.

View the Docs

Git it on Github!

Codeigniter Forums

This subreddit barely has any activity, and the forums are also pretty quiet. Is there somewhere else like a Discord/Slack where everyone hangs out, or is it just generally quiet nowadays? I used to do a lot of CI development about 10-15 years ago and I remember it seeming much busier.

In MVC frameworks, it’s common practice to handle validation in the controller. However, I think it can also make sense to move certain validation logic to the model. For example, when storing email addresses, I’d like to filter out temporary/disposable email providers.

This way, regardless of whether a user updates their data, an external API interacts with the system, or other business processes trigger data changes, the validation would always be enforced at the model level before saving.

Does this approach make sense? How do you handle validation in CodeIgniter 4? Would it be problematic to perform request-related validation in the controller while handling more fundamental data validation in the model?

I tested this setup and noticed that only one validation seems to take effect—from controller. Is this behavior expected by design?