After three years of building site after site, I crafted what would become my own web framework in 2003. I didn’t know such a thing was called a framework — to me, it was just a bunch of code I kept reusing, so I structured it in a fashion I learned on my first job as a web developer.<\/p>\n
I called that project Vigilante<\/a>. It’s a code base that’s powered every site I’ve built, including ones I’ve done for the office. As of today, Vigilante is officially retired.<\/p>\n I spent the past week moving all my sites to CodeIgniter<\/a> and jQuery<\/a>. I’ve had a passing understanding of the Model-View-Controller pattern<\/a> for a while now, and I even toyed with Ruby on Rails<\/a> very briefly. I liked what Rails had to offer, but I’m at a point in my life where learning a new language just to use a new framework is a time sink in which I don’t want to invest.<\/p>\n At the same time, I knew Vigilante was getting creaky, and a shift in my own personal priorities — i.e., away from coding all the damn time — made me reluctant to bring it up to speed.<\/p>\n If I were to move to a framework, it would need to be one that would make the transition easy. So I did what I usually do when I’m stumped about something — I asked MetaFilter<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I’d heard of CakePHP<\/a>, but I didn’t like how it seemed to preclude use of the Smarty<\/a> template engine. I moved all my views to Smarty years ago, and I was unwilling to recode all those templates to a new engine. As feature-rich as Cake seemed to be, it felt a bit too much, and I could foresee hours of refactoring code to line up with Cake’s expectations. I needed something a bit more flexible.<\/p>\n Another suggestion I encountered was CodeIgniter<\/a>. In fact, it was this comment<\/a> that got me curious. So I downloaded<\/a> the code, went through the documentation<\/a> and got something working in lickety-split.<\/p>\n What got me sold was the ability to move over a single application at work in a day.<\/p>\n So I embarked on porting perhaps the biggest application I’ve made which no one else gets to use — the Vigilant Media administrative interface, which lets me manage the content of this site, as well as Musicwhore.org<\/a>, Austin Stories<\/a> and the Eponymous 4<\/a> official site. I had the sense that if I could successfully move that site over the CodeIgniter, it would essentially prepare the move of the other sites.<\/p>\n I was not mistaken.<\/p>\n With the MVC pattern in place, I could effectively reuse the models between sites and built better libraries out of the old Vigilante code. Vigilante was not object-oriented, and it made maintenance tedious. With CodeIgniter, I was able to modularize that old code even further.<\/p>\n It took about two months to get the Vigilant Media administrative interface done. The lion’s share was dealing with the Musicwhore.org interface. This past week, I moved all my other sites over. In the past, it would have taken me weeks to relaunch just one<\/em> site. CodeIgniter allowed me to turn around four<\/em> sites much more quickly.<\/p>\n