EllisLab Seeking New Owner for CodeIgniter

EllisLab prepares to say farewell to a much beloved product.

CodeIgniter is one of the world’s most popular Open Source PHP frameworks, used by thousands of developers powering hundreds of thousands of sites, in addition to being deployed as the underpinning of every ExpressionEngine installation. As of this writing it is the second most watched PHP project hosted at GitHub, surpassing Slim, Yii, CakePHP, Zend, and Laravel in either followers, contributors, or both. It has the highest number of forks of any PHP project at GitHub of all time. It is used by everyone from AT&T to Home Depot to Dictionary.com, to Rachael Ray to Magento to the Mail & Guardian, to the Universities of Missouri, Michigan, Texas, Georgia, and more (Sources: builtwith.com, wappalyzer.com). And it is used as the server-side back end for many mobile apps.

Throughout its seven year life thus far, CodeIgniter has consistently received praise for being both speedy and surefooted. Small and lightweight, resistant to feature bloat, retaining compatibility with contemporary technology, the framework earned the reputation of being low-risk and high-gain, which fueled its worldwide adoption.

So why are we we looking for a new home for CodeIgniter? At EllisLab, our overriding goal is to relentlessly pursue only the things that are both right for us and that best serve our customers’ needs. Everything we do must utilize our resources properly and must fit within our business model and goals. If we cannot give an opportunity the proper attention it deserves without sacrificing from elsewhere, the responsible action—even if it’s difficult—is to say no.

In the last few years we moved CodeIgniter’s development truly into the open and assigned lieutenants from the community to help manage the repository.  Yet, we are not a services company so funding models that would allow us to dedicate significant resources to CodeIgniter, such as those used by Linux, Mozilla, Zend, Magento, etc., would not work without radically changing our focus. As a result, we have always been unable to be involved to the degree we feel the project owner should. That means this project is not the right fit for EllisLab. So beginning today we are officially seeking a new home for CodeIgniter.

We love CodeIgniter and want to see it continue to thrive. PHP as a language is maturing, and CodeIgniter deserves to take advantage of its new stabilized features. CodeIgniter’s community deserves input and interaction with the people minding the gate. CodeIgniter will be best served by someone with a focused vision for it, along with the resources to achieve that vision. It needs someone to skillfully utilize the brand’s immense traffic, and direct the thousands of voices of input towards common goals. EllisLab can’t provide those things without adopting a fundamentally different business model or taking attention away from our primary flywheel. CodeIgniter deserves to be someone’s primary flywheel.

So with mixed feelings of both joy and sadness, we are seeking a new home for CodeIgniter. Our objective is to do what is best for the framework and its community, so we are willing to consider a variety of acquisition scenarios. If you are interested, we’d like to hear how you envision the framework evolving under your stewardship, and what qualifications you or your organization would bring to CodeIgniter. If this describes you and you have a plan and the resources to carry this wonderful framework into the future, please .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).