Integrating Doctrine 2 with CodeIgniter 2

Overview

CodeIgniter is my favourite PHP framework. The documentation is fantastic, and there is a wide range of community-developed libraries available. Recently, however, CodeIgniter has received criticism from users of other frameworks for its lack of updates and non-modular design.

Doctrine is my ORM of choice but like CodeIgniter, it has been criticised for its overly-magic approach and poor performance.

CodeIgniter and Doctrine have both received a complete overhaul, and version 2 of each promises huge benefits over the previous versions. CodeIgniter 2 focuses on modularity and the performance gains of PHP5. Doctrine 2 loses most of its magic, but receives dramatic performance gains by making good use of PHP5’s OOP features.

When I heard that CodeIgniter 2 and Doctrine 2 were both in beta, I took the opportunity to have a sneak-peak at both systems. This post documents my approach to integrating Doctrine 2 with CodeIgniter 2, and acts as a guide for others that wish to do the same. If you are following this as a guide, you can start by downloading Doctrine 2 and CodeIgniter 2.