A look inside CodeIgniters Database Forge

CodeIgniter released version 1.6.0 a few days ago and one of the new features is a Database Forge class which helps in managing a database. I have been upgrading the core of 68KB and because of this new feature I upgraded the whole install and upgrade routines to take advantage.

Before I was manually inserting the queries and prefixing the tables by pulling out the prefix value from the database settings. Now I no longer have to do this and the install runs a whole lot smoother. For us probably the biggest advantage to this system is now when you install the knowledge base the database tables have the charset that you enter in the config file. This should make the whole system more multi-lingual and available to more people.

Also this should allow for support for multiple database types besides just MySQL. Although currently we are only going to officially support MySQL but who knows what the future holds since the Sun buy out.

I am still very excited about the 1.6 release of CodeIgniter and I am really glad we decided to develop our script on top of it.