After 6 hours of massive anxiety, stress, near tears, one pound on my desk, and some hair pulling, I tracked down the source of a nagging Disallowed Key Character error that I received while using CodeIgniter: an extra line break.

She eventually figured out that the newline and carriage return characters are not allowed as a part of the framework. Unfortunately, it was a random newline after a controller's code that did it for her.

I started reading "CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development" as a novice. This book is specially targeted to anybody like me: little or no prior experience of Object Oriented Programming or the MVC approach, with couple of years procedural PHP experience, and is after something that can really take you to the next level.

The reviewer (Ryan Partington) talks about what the CodeIgniter framework is, his struggle with the MVC concept, how the book is divided up and the benchmarking of framework applications.

Chances are, however, that you just want to get on with coding, and don't want to have to deal with complex libraries. CodeIgniter achieves this wonderfully, staying out of your way but offering a lot of functionality if and when you need it.

The tutorial takes a little time to explain what an MVC framework is before getting in to how to use it (it makes more sense when you know how requests are handled). They create a simple "jobs" application to get you started that not only shows the structure of a simple app, but also includes how interface it with a (MySQL) database as well.

The Zend Framework is a fairly standard, (optionally) MVC PHP application framework. It comes with all the usual functionality; request routing, database access, templates (through view files) etc. [...] But here's the kicker: it works entirely standalone. The classes and their methods can, generally, be used statically in any context, or at least independently of the framework.

They point out that the components of the Zend Framework, while able to happily live in their self-contained MVC bubble, can also break "out of the box" and live their own happy, separate lives. He even points out another blog entry looking at using the Zend Framework right along side CodeIgniter in a web application.

I began hunting for PHP frameworks ever since Ruby on Rails hit the street. [...] I did a lot of searches, and researches, and finally I was happy to see CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter has progressed well and gained many web developers' trust, despite a few glitches. One of which was the spawn of the fork: Kohana.

He points out the Wikipedia page showing some of the differences but the real interest in this post is the more than complete table directly comparing the two frameworks (specific versions of each). Items compared on include supported databases, community, conventions, caching, web service support and unit testing integration.

Version 1.6.1 is primarily a maintenance release, but does bring a handful of nice feature additions and enhancements. After a very successful 1.6.0 release, a series of bugs have been squashed and enhancements have been made that we wanted to roll out as a formal release.

The update process is just replacing a few files from your current installation. Check out the Changelog for more information on the updates made and, if you're not quite sure what you're doing on the update, check out their handy update instructions.

For the upcoming 2008 South by Southwest, EllisLab has several exciting events planned; including an open panel discussion, a brunch event... and heck, let's just cut to it, the Party at the Moonshine Grill! (This WILL be the highlight of the conference for you - promise).

You can get more on the conference from its website and more about the EllisLab group from their homepage.