Thanks for this post!

Personally, I do all my dev work in PHP 5 and despite people’s thinking on this matter CakePHP works just fine in PHP 5, there is just some code in the associative data mapping functionality that does checks based on what version of PHP you are running.

I assure you that it’s valid code, because it does work. Now, perhaps I will go back and refactor it to be more along the lines of CI best practices, but in the effort to Get It Done I might have to leave it for now.

Functions allow non-programmers to flex the Views as much as they like. Take, for instance, Wordpress. There are literally thousands of people out there that can’t write PHP code for the life of them yet they develop Wordpress themes. The functions provide a sense of simplicity, whereas OOP practices can tend to complicate things unnecessarily. In addition, the functions are merely wrappers for methods within the class (I believe – I’d have to look over the source again) – so if you truly wanted to go OOP, it shouldn’t be an issue.

The sloppy code you mention in the Controller is just that – sloppy code. The developer is truly abusing the flexibility within CodeIgniter (and the fact that it runs on PHP4 or 5). Honestly, I don’t even think that is valid code.

Personally, I always use CodeIgniter on a PHP5 installation and write my code as such. You can pass the $data variable to the View as an object just as easily as it can be an array.


// Any loading should be at the top of the method
$this->load->model('users_m');
$this->load->model('layout_m');
// Get our header/footer (this would probably be in a constructor actually
$this->data->layout = $this->layout_m->getLayout();
// Get user information using a session var (prob. another good line for the constructor
$this->data->user = $this->users_m->getUser($this->session->userdata('id'));
// Send it all to our view file
$this->load->view('welcome', $this->data);


* As great as the auto-association stuff that Cake does for you is, my app is complex enough that 9 times out of 10 I needed to write dedicated queries to give me the needed flexibility and speed. The overhead Cake introduced in its associations was beginning to slow things down.
* I don’t generate HTML views for my pages, just send JSON data to a JS frontend, so I didn’t need all Cake’s advanced View stuff (and convention that “required” you to always have a separate view file). I appreciated the flexibility of the “looser” MVC approach in CodeIgnitor.
* The number of really useful utilities (helpers, classes etc) built in to CodeIgnitor was very impressive.
* Small footprint
* Great documentation.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time working with Cake, but I found CodeIgnitor offered me the speed and flexibility I needed for this particular app.

Anyways, I too believe that Cake is a stronger framework. But we were forced to use CodeIgniter, because back that day, we had to build some modules for a web site which was already hosted on an IIS server and supporting only php4.