We're consistently asked about the software that we use to develop websites. Recently, both Justin and I have made a change that we both found exciting. We're using the new IDE Sublime Text 2. We've been using it for close to a month now and we thought that it'd be nice to tell people about it.
Read more about Sublime Text 2 on their development blog.
The current version of my syntax highlighting theme, "Soylent Theme."
To install: open ST2, choose 'preferences', 'browse packages', choose 'user', and drop the file there. You can then change to the theme by going to 'preferences' and choosing it under 'color scheme -> user'. In addition I highly recommend installing "Package Control" and use it to install the "Dark Soda UI Theme" as it compliments my syntax highlighting theme very well.
CodeIgniter is a PHP development framework. You can think of it as a PHP web site without content. Instead it provides a structure and many methods that will be frequently used for most web sites.
So, why should I use CodeIgniter instead of just writing my own site from scratch in PHP?
Hiring good developers is hard and adding developers mid-project is even harder. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of hours are spent acclimating new developers to the code base. By hiring developers who are already familiar with CodeIgniter you're able to integrate them into the project much more quickly. CodeIgniter is very compartmentalized and finding / modifying various bits of code should be very easy for anyone familiar with the framework. Initial project development time can be reduced by partially bypassing the need for planning of a custom framework.
CodeIgniter is a framework that is widely used and it's easy to find developers who are familiar with it. There are many well made libraries and helpers created by users that will allow developers to integrate functionality into their sites without having to write it all from scratch. The CodeIgniter forums provide a centralized location for developers to get support from other developers.
By keeping your database interactions in libraries and models, your html and display logic in views, and additional methods in helpers and plugins your resulting code becomes modular and is easily reusable on additional projects. Why rewrite your user authentication system from project to project when you can simply copy your database structure and user model and be done with it?
CodeIgniter is written with object oriented PHP. Object oriented code is significantly less expensive to develop, debug, and maintain. Programmers can no longer get away with using global variables to pass data around the application and the project quality benefits significantly.
CodeIgniter comes out of the metaphorical box with libraries and helpers that reduce the amount of code a developer will have to write. Some examples of the functionality that comes bundled in are: benchmarking, html calendar generation, shopping cart management, email sending, file uploading, form validation, ftp transfers, html generation, form generation, internationalization, pagination, session management, trackback management, string / typography manipulation, and more than I can list here.
