Codeigniter Controllers Give Server 404

I often take shortcuts when setting up my development servers. I recently installed Linux Mint 12 x64 on my main box and wanted to setup a web developing environment on it. To cut corners during package installation, I’ll typically install phpmyadmin which grabs most of the dependencies I need to have a full LAMP dev stack, such as Apache2 and Mysql-server.

That’s how I initially set up my stack in Linux Mint. I also enabled user directories in Apache so I could develop within the public_html directory inside my home directory. All was working well until I copied a CodeIgniter project over and tried it out. I couldn’t access my controller functions from index.php. It worked well for the default controller because it was accessing it from index.php, but when I changed the URL to point to a controller like index.php/admin, it didn’t know what to do with it and I would receiver a server 404 error.

After digging around for a solution, I realized that when I installed my LAMP stack, apt had installed libapache2-mod-php5filter instead of libapache2-mod-php5. I’m not very familiar with this module or what benefits come from using it, but the quick fix was to:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

This removed the php5filter module and installed the plain php5 module. After that, I no longer have an issue with the controllers giving 404 errors.

The Best PHP Framework

I searched for the best PHP framework for a while. I tried CakePHP, Zend, Yii, Symfony, and Codeigniter. Some of them frustrated me to the point that I was ready to write my own mini-framework. I think the problem with some of them, at least from my perspective, is that they try to do too much. Some were just poorly documented. Sure, you can find all the information you need to find about all the features, but they don’t make it very easy. For this post, I want to compare two of the most recent frameworks I’ve worked with, Codeigniter and Symfony.

I use Codeigniter for all of my personal projects these days. Recently, I had to use Symfony for some other work I was doing. I can see positive and negative aspects of each system at this point, and this is an overview of their main differences.

First, I’ll talk about Symfony. It includes two ORMs, Doctrine and Propel. I was using Doctrine. It relies heavily on the ORM as it should, but I found utilizing an ORM to be overly complex. This may be due to my own ignorance, but when using an ORM, you have to get into a different mindset. Most people would view the ORM as a feature. For me, it was unwanted. Symfony is a great framework and is used by many people. My distaste for it should not be a deciding factor in choosing your own framework.

However, I would like to point out other things about Symfony that I didn’t like. First of all, the directory structure is overly complex, especially when your job is to maintain code that is already in place. You may find yourself looking at a page and going through 10 different files trying to find where the code is located. Symfony has a ton of plugins, many of which have auto-generated forms and templates. There are times that you won’t find the code that generates the form and from what I saw, your only option is to override the plugin’s actions and templates. If the code you’re maintaining doesn’t override the plugin, you will have to check cache files for the auto-generated PHP and then implement this in the override.

While we are talking about caching, I’ll point out that this is a good feature and it’s implemented by default in Symfony. During the development maintenance of a site, however, it gets on my nerves. So, you’ll spend a lot of time clearing your cache from the command line. Symfony depends on command line usage. While I like using a command line in most cases, I don’t want to be jumping back and forth between my IDE, command line, and web browser so much. Since Symfony auto-generates a ton of code for you through the use of the command line, I can see the advantage, but I prefer the Codeigniter way.

So, let me talk about Codeigniter and why I prefer it to all other frameworks I’ve tried.

First of all, it stays out of your way. It arranges your site into three folders, as I think it should, models, views, and controllers. You can then arrange your files in sub-directories under these main folders as you wish. So if you have a user system on your site, you can put all your views for that section under views/user.

While I’m on the subject of views, let me touch on Symfony’s templates and layouts. It’s actually a good system and cuts back on the amount of code one has to write, but it depends on yaml config files in various locations. I liked the idea, but hated the implementation. I much prefer having the view source where I can easily find it. In Codeigniter, I get all my data ready to send to a view, then load that view. In this view, I can load other views as needed. So if my page has a top navigation menu, I can just load that menu from within my view. This templating system works best for me, and I don’t have to search through config files at various locations to find out where the HTML is located.

Finally, documentation is much better in Codeigniter. If you want to know how a library or helper works, their documentation makes it simple to understand. Symfony’s documentation is terrible in comparison. There’s a reference but it’s just not that good. Plus much of the documentation you’ll need is actually on the Doctrine site.

Symfony has many features that Codeigniter doesn’t. Codeigniter is much easier to use, has the best documentation, and is much easier to maintain. These three things are why I prefer Codeigniter. Maintainability and ease of use are the two main reasons to implement a Framework anyway. Without these two things, one would be much better off using straight OOP PHP.

 

 

The Best PHP Framework?

I’ve been really interested in using a PHP framework. One thing holding me back is deciding which one to work with. It seems that every time I start looking at frameworks, I end up deciding to just code everything manually. The major contenders seem to be Yii, Zend, Symfony, CakePHP, and CodeIgnitor. However, I have no idea which one I’m going to use. It’s hard to decide without learning the ins and outs of each one and making a good decision based on that knowledge.

My latest attempt was with the Zend framework. I was getting into it and realized that most of the documentation for setting it up bases the setup from a virtual host in Apache. This would be fine, but it actually makes development and deployment overly complicated for me. My development environment is a Linux machine that is my main desktop. My production server is my own dedicated server with CPanel. Zend doesn’t work very well with this setup from what I can tell.

I want my site to transfer easily between the two environments. I like them to be self-contained as well. I want to throw the framework into a lib folder or link to it in some way. I don’t like that the forward-facing web site is in the “public” folder. I want the root of the website to be the forward-facing public website.

I would really like to use Zend because it has a lot of good extensions for utilizing various web services.

I’d like to hear from others. Which framework would you recommend and why?