A framework for speed

When I first started posting to this blog I had the (unstated) goal of posting every 2 to 3 days. I’ve not posted for two weeks. 2 days != 2 weeks. Sorry. To be fair, I just moved into a new house, so between the packing, moving, and unpacking I’ve not had time for much of anything. However, if I were smart I would’ve planned for that by either saying I was going to take a break or making sure I’d have content ready during that time period. I did neither. Lesson learned; it won’t happen again.

Anyway, while I was building out the registration forms for the site I realized that I was not moving fast enough (yet again). I was diving into all sorts of intricacies of form validation when I knew there had to be a much easier way to do it. I needed a framework that could do the heavy lifting leaving me to simply build out the pages on the site without having to write so much code. I stumbled upon a couple solutions, one being CakePHP and the other CodeIgniter. After studying them both I decided upon using CodeIgniter, mainly because it seemed faster, smaller, and easier to use.* It many ways it feels like an extension to PHP, providing a vast array of tools without requiring you to use any of them. And their documentation supports that. You can easily grab a class or a helper, quickly reference it, complete the task you’re on and move right on to the next thing.

After completing the registration form I’ll need to take a quick detour and work on the style for a bit. I’ve toyed around with a couple styling possibilities, but I need to solidify something soon or else I’m going to have to come back later and update the classes on every tag on every page. That doesn’t sound like fun.

*Note that this is entirely based on my perception, not reality, as I’ve not had the time to play with them both fully. Your mileage may vary.