30 May 06
An interesting link popped up in my del.icio.us network today. A new lightweight PHP framework. Yes, another day, another lightweight framework appears… * shakes fist at Rails *. Anyway, as I hadn’t heard anything about this Code Igniter framework, I thought I’d give it a shot.
If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks that require rocket science to understand, Code Igniter might just be the right tool for you.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? That was until I got to the User Guide. Yes, it is documented, and yes, it isn’t overtly large to read. But the effort in reading the user guide made me want to kill myself.
The user guide is usually one of the first things I go to when I visit one of these sites, to see if it’s worth me spending time on the product.
First thing I noticed was the lack of table of contents, until I realised it was hidden at the top of the page. Why, oh why, would you hide the most important feature of the documentation? I don’t care if it does a magic DHTML (or should I say DCSS) drop down – I want a functional page. Give me a functional page. Don’t hide the table of contents. Make it a prominent feature of the page. It’s very important. At the very least, make sure it’s visible somewhere on the page when I get to it.
How am I, or anyone else, in the web development community meant to take you seriously when you can’t view any of the guide without Javascript? Or when I can’t learn anything about the product without having to watch a video. I don’t to have to click on two links to get to another page. And neither does anyone else. And the guys who make this should know this, but they’re sacrificing basic usability for things “that look cool”. Well guys, you’re wrong. I recommend you go in a dark corner and read some Nielsen. A dark corner with a light… y’know, so you can, like, read…
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Yeah, I knew I’d seen the design somewhere before – very heavily inspired by Shaun’s design. The difference between Shaun’s and Code Igniter’s designs is that I can get round Shaun’s site without having to use the drop down. Let’s be honest though, the dropdown on Shaun’s site is only there because it’s visual fluff. It doesn’t need to be there, it’s there to show his “l33t” designer skillz.
Yeah I agree, but looking at it from that angle, do we really need CSS then? At the end of the day it is only visual fluff! :P
Comment by Steve Tucker on 31 May 2006, 11:33
You can definitely tell the Javascript design was inspired by Shaun Inman’s (http://www.shauninman.com/plete/). Difference is Shaun’s was done right. I find it hard to believe that the designers simply shunned non-JS enabled browsers on such an important aspect of the document. Like you said, documentation has primarily a functional purpose – not to sit n look pretty. It really should also have had a PDF alternative for download too.