I recently had the opportunity to join a great group of people building websites using the CodeIgniter framework. After building websites with WordPress for several years I was looking forward to learning a new framework and was interested to know how it would compare in both speed of development and quality of the Website build.
It is important to note that CodeIgniter is not for beginning web developers. The CodeIgniter framework requires significant knowledge of PHP, javascript, mySQL, CSS, and html. Knowledge of application architecture is also required for best performance and scaleability.
For websites that have low traffic volume and for which high speed response times are not critical, WordPress can not be beat. It’s ease of installation and user friendly updates are great for the beginner to intermediate web developer. When the correct method for making customizations is followed, WordPress can be a very effective and competitive framework to use. (this website is WordPress)
When using WordPress for enterprise level web applications, WordPress becomes more of a PHP framework that is customized similar to any PHP framework. Developers dissect the application and use only in house plugins and themes that are streamlined for the specific application. This improves the efficiency of the application and removes all the unnecessary code bloat and bugs that come with third party plugins and themes. The core files are not altered and major core updates can still occur.
When a developer has reached the need for this level of sophistication and customization it is time to question whether WordPress is the best framework to use. Since the developer is no longer using the things that sped up development (namely third party plugins) why not consider using a framework that is truly light weight in structure yet provides all the necessary classes for building a truly performant application?
The main reason this does not happen is the organization has built in-house “plugins” or codes snippets that speed their web development process up. Copying large sections of code for reuse is common practice in all types of application development and web development is no different. When an organization has built a large in house library using one framework, the upfront cost of starting over with another framework seems too great.
It is this cycle that causes an organization to get stuck in one framework. If the organization has started small using WordPress and grows into needing to providing high performance, scalable web applications it may run into problems making the transition to large scale enterprise level web applications as the cost of a transition is seen as too high. Not wanting to spend the extra money on sophisticated developers or take the time to learn a new process.
In the end my experience with both WordPress and CodeIgniter has led me to believe the best choice depends on your clients needs (go figure?). WordPress is slow. Too slow for enterprise level websites out of the box. It is perfect for low to medium traffic web sites and keeps build costs low initially.
While WordPress is used by many enterprise level web sites the level of necessary customization to reach acceptable performance levels is on par with any other framework. So for the enterprise level website my vote goes to CodeIgniter.
~ Layer7web4 responses to “WordPress vs. Codeigniter”
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Jeffrey,
Thank you for your remarks, which raise an interesting question in my mind.
I support an existing WordPress site which is adequate in its speed and capability.
However, I also need to add an enhancement that will involve some significant database processing and logic. I am thinking of using CodeIgniter for this functionality, and I really want to incorporate the CodeIgniter functionality into the WordPress site. Do you have any thoughts on this; that is, rather than opting for WordPress or CodeIgniter, how about an integrated use of both, capitalizing on the strengths of each? Have you ever experimented with this approach?
It is great that you mentioned this because I am currently building a site using CodeIgniter for the site and WordPress for the blog. One of the main reasons we are using WordPress for the blog is the clients previous site used it and they want to transfer the posts to the new site. Using WordPress makes this transition very easy and fast. Another advantage to using WordPress for the blog is that it is simply a great blogging platform. Many people know how to use it so training is often unnecessary.
Using the “best tool” for the job is what web development is all about. Making the user experience seamless so the transition between the two frameworks is not disruptive can often take time.
I can also become cumbersome to have to login to two different admin panels to administer the site, but I am sure the performance will outweigh this annoyance.
The bottom line is it’s a great approach that can work in many different circumstances.
I just acknowledge about both, WordPress is used for CMS and CodeIgniter is a framework.
Nowadays CMS is being used as an alternate as frameworks. This will work if you have an easy site to develop.
Wordpress is popular and widely used CMS the ideal to be used for your walking clients who need a simple site to manage, however, there are many multiple plugins available for WordPress that you can turn WordPress into a complete web application.
So if you have to compare CodeIgniter and WordPress in terms of speed, you will develop site faster in WordPress than in CodeIgniter as in CI you have to develop each and every module(MVC).
In term of security, WordPress keeps publishing its patches so you need to make assured your website is constantly up-to-date with all its plugins or you are at risk, if you are using CodeIgniter you need to take care of security yourself I thought both working great as their uses and for chosen for development site you can develop MVC and CMS, Thank’s Great Article
Well written!
CodeIgniter apps can be set up to use an ongoing WordPress Database, although technically feasible the other way around it would be ill-advised as it’s not the WordPress way of doing things.