Easiest and light-weighted framework of PHP

You have done training or internship in PHP and understood the basics, oops concepts, build some projects … Cool.

 Now if you are looking to learn something new on PHP  then this post is going to be useful for you.
Hi there, I am Ankit, will try to make you understand what should you learn after core PHP. Well… There are verify of frameworks on PHP but I will suggest learning the easiest and light-weighted first.

The most popular and trending framework is Laravel. Then you must be thinking “I should learn Laravel ? “.  Of course, you can but if talk about simplicity and easiness then there is no other framework except CodeIgniter. Here we will talk about it.

From my experience, I will suggest CodeIgniter, the first framework to learn.
It is always a good practice to start with small & simple things to learn. If you want to continue you have to learn more than 1 framework.

Once you start with something simple you can get into more complex frameworks like Yii, Symphony, CakePHP, Zend, Laravel, etc.

What is CodeIgniter?

CodeIgniter is a very easy, simple, lightweight, MVC framework of PHP for developing applications rapidly in an easy way. MVC stands for Model View Controller. CodeIgniter’s libraries are out of the box for connecting to the database and performing various operations like sending emails, uploading files, managing sessions, etc. Read more about Library & Frameworks.

Why learn CodeIgniter?

Easy to install

CodeIgniter is also called CI in short. CI has a system folder and index.php.Installation is very easy unlike other PHP frameworks, the Composer is not required for installation.  Just download the stable version from here and extract it to the root directory of your server. Change the base URL in config.php, you are ready to go.

Easy to learn

CI is simply has everything you required to write good code like MCV, Query builders and helper. It takes a couple of weeks to code confidently in CodeIgniter.

CI’s official user guide is excellent with plenty of examples of every topic. It also used in REST API development for mobile applications and making HTTP requests.

After your experience with the easiest and light-weighted CI, Laravel is now easier to pick up. You can do the same thing in different ways. Laravel seems to be a better MCV framework than CodeIgniter but its docs are not good as CI.