CodeIgniter 4

I’ve been looking into PHP again, and I notice that CodeIgniter 4 is being worked on. I couldn’t help myself, I have such fond memories of CodeIgniter, I had to take a peek. Let me tell you, it looks freaking awesome. It’s not quite yet ready for prime time, but I like the direction it’s headed in.

I honestly felt that CI as a platform was really starting to show its age, and though that is not necessarily bad, it was definitely time for a refresh. It just didn’t take advantage of modern PHP constructs as well as it could have. That all said, even the older CI platforms are still very good. It’s stable, easy to learn, and really allows you to churn out projects quickly.

I am glad to see that even though CI 4 is getting a modern twist, it’s just a twist. It’s not such a massive change that it feels like a whole new platform such as FuelPHP or Laravel. It still feels like CodeIgniter. That’s very important. Your old CI 3 and earlier projects are definitely not going to be translatable without overhaul though, so don’t expect the migration to be easy if you decide to take it up. But really, if the old projects are working, they don’t necessarily need to be migrated. Depending on their complexity and their criticality, some projects should definitely be migrated once the platform is ready. Just don’t expect it to be an overnight conversion. You didn’t write all that code overnight, the conversion isn’t likely to happen in a day.