EllisLab released the latest version of CodeIgniter on January 30th. They've made plenty of improvements and bug fixes, and you can check out the changelog on their site. I've been using CodeIgniter for projects at work for about six months and I love it. It's made my code much more organized and easy to modify. If you aren't using CodeIgniter, or some other kind of PHP framework, I suggest you try it out. It's lightweight, easy to learn, and the documentation is fantastic.

One feature that I've always wanted is multiple views. Most web sites are split up into chunks like the header, sidebar, main content and footer areas. With regular PHP, you'd just do a require() to load the part you want, but with CodeIgniter it always felt a bit messy doing that.

Now if you want to load multiple views, you can do the following:

one

That's a great improvement, but today I was working on something where I want to have the loader return the view instead of render it right away. I loaded up the code for the loader and found out that it's already there. I didn't see it mentioned in the wonderful user guide, but I tried it out and it works great. So if you want to load a view but have it return the view as a string instead of rendering it, all you have to do is:

two

I'll be using this all of the time now. It's a great feature that just makes sense a lot of the time.