As a freelance developer, inheriting and working with code I did not originally write is common place. More often than not, code written using a known framework results in perfectly readable code, easy enough to work with and extend. Granted, every project is not written in Laravel 5, but the code that I inherit is workable.
When I recently inherited a complicated CodeIgniter site I was (initially) confident I’d have a good base to extend and work with. How wrong I was I? I could literally write a book about why the project I inherited was so bad. For the sake of brevity, I’ll stick to the main issues.
This post proves a single statement. Code written using a framework, is not necessarily “good”. It can end up painfully awful. In retrospect, I would have preferred to inherit a WordPress site. At least then my expectations are low to begin with 🙂
There are a plethora of reasons to use a good base model (also called CRUD Model, MY-Model) for all your CRUD operations in a CodeIgniter (or any) application. Amongst many, a base model will boostrap all models it extends, keep your application as “DRY” as possible and speed up general development. Codeigniter has a pretty neat active record implementation, but you do tend to repeat a lot of the boring database stuff when writing models. In my opinion, you’d be insane not to use a good base model. There are many out there, but I use the amazing