CodeIgniter is an open source web application framework for use in building dynamic web sites with PHP. It enables developers to build applications faster - compared to coding from scratch - by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and a logical structure to access these libraries. The first public version of CodeIgniter was released on February 28, 2006. The latest stable version 1.6.3 was released June 26, 2008.


CodeIgniter encourages use of the model-view-controller architectural pattern.

It shares a number of characteristic concepts and features with other MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails:

    * Support for multiple database platforms
    * database access with active records
    * Session Management
    * Form and Data Validation
    * Full Page Caching
    * Scaffolding
    * Template Engine Class
    * Support for Hooks, Class Extensions, and Plugins

Among other MVC frameworks, CodeIgniter positions itself by these properties:

    * PHP 4 Compatible. Use with PHP 5 provides benefits such as method chaining ability.
    * Light weight codebase
    * Simple installation and directory structure
    * Error Logging
    * Flexible URI Routing

It adds a number of features or classes that other frameworks do not yet offer per default:

    * Security and XSS Filtering
    * Email Sending Class. Supports Attachments, HTML/Text email, multiple protocols (sendmail, SMTP, and Mail) and more.
    * Image Manipulation Library (cropping, resizing, rotating, etc.). Supports GD, ImageMagick, and NetPBM
    * File Uploading Class
    * FTP Class
    * Localization
    * Pagination
    * Data Encryption
    * Benchmarking
    * Application Profiling
    * Calendaring Class
    * User Agent Class
    * Zip Encoding Class
    * Trackback Class
    * XML-RPC Library
    * Unit Testing Class
    * Search-engine Friendly URLs
    * Large library of "helper" functions.