CodeIgniter ‘s first public version was released by EllisLab in February 2006. In October 2014, EllisLab, Owner of CodeIgniter announced that CodeIgniter would continue development under the stewardship of the British Columbia Institute of Technology. The latest stable version 3.0.3 was released October 31, 2015 under MIT License. Prior versions of CodeIgniter 3.0 were licensed under a proprietary Apache/BSD-style open source license.

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework for building full featured PHP web applications. It empowers the PHP developers or more specifically CodeIgniter developers to develop PHP website application much faster in an efficient and effective manner by providing rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries.

PHP version Support

In new CI 3, PHP 5.1.6 is no more supported. Now it requires minimum PHP 5.2.4 version. So its recommended to use PHP 5.4+ or newer. As anyway the use of deprecated resources will definitely cause problem in future, so its better to use latest version of PHP.

Default database driver

New CI 3 changed the default database driver to ‘mysqli’ (the old ‘mysql’ driver is DEPRECATED).

New and updated mime Support

The list is very long of the files that CI 3 has added support for.

1. Added support for pem, p10, p12, p7a, p7c, p7m, p7r, p7s, crt, crl,rsa, der, kdb,sst, cer, csr Certs to mimes.php.
2. Added support for pgp, gpg, zsh and cdr files to mimes.php.
3. Added support for 3gp, 3g2, f4v, vlc , mp4, wmv Video files to mimes.php
4. Added support for m4a, xspf, au, aac, m4u, ac3, flac, ogg, wma Audio files to mimes.php.
5. Added support for kmz and kml (Google Earth) files, ics Calendar files, and rar, jar and 7zip archives to mimes.php.
6. CI 3 has also updated support for xml, xsl, doc, docx, php, zip and csv files in mimes.php

Other Changes

• Minifying HTML Output
• Minifying JS/CSS
• Database improvements
• Changes in libarary
• Changes in Helpers
• Changes in migration