Frameworks - Code Igniter
For the past 10+ years I have been building websites and I have always built them from scratch, a few years ago I discovered javascript frameworks and have been a big fan of jQuery ever since but the main code for the website has always been coded from a blank canvas. A few weeks ago after hearing different frameworks mentioned I decided to take a look into them and on the advice of the BNM list I decided on Code Igniter as a starting point.
Code Igniter seems to be in the middle when compared to different frameworks, it will do a lot for you but it is very easy to set up and as a result doesn't do as much as bigger systems such as Symfony.
I had decided on the framework but needed an idea for a website, I turned to my girlfriend for suggestions and she came back with 'happy', as you probably imagine I looked a little puzzled.
Despite being an odd topic I came up with the idea of a social aggregation site around the topic of happiness.
It took an evening but I came up with a very basic, one page site that displayed twitter posts and flickr images all related to the topic happy, the next evening I added a couple more pages to narrow the range to just text, photos or videos.
You can see the site I came up with here, happy.arthurguy.co.uk
This was a very basic site but it was a nice introduction to the framework and how easy it is to deal with, I especially like the automatic url structure, rather then messing around with htaccess files to get the address looking nice it happens automatically.