Switching from Matchbox to Modular Extensions

[UPDATE: Matchbox is back!]

After over 2 years of being a loyal matchbox user I am now at a crossroads. Our back office framework, e-commerce framework, cms, image galleries, etc. etc. etc. all completely rely on matchbox. Unfortunately, when Codeigniter 1.7 rolled out, matchbox didn’t keep up. There were a few issues with codeigniter’s new validation library with the latest release and I released a hacked matchbox loader in hopes that the developer would eventually come out with his own, but that was last November.

This brings me to the topic of this post – I will be converting all of our applications and modules from Matchbox to Modular Extensions in the coming weeks. As I made that decision I realized there are a lot of other matchbox users who like me haven’t really used Modular Extensions, and are hesitant to take the leap. So, as I work my way through it I will be posting to a new category with my progress. At the end, I will try to wrap it all up and make a step by step conversion tutorial for other matchbox users still on the fence.

My apologies to Zacharias if he just hasn’t had time to work on it (he has been doing it free of charge btw), if not then I am truly sorry to see matchbox die. This post isn’t meant to be a complaint/rip on him, matchbox has been invaluable to us, and this decision was not made easily.

Being a commercial user, and relying on these code bases for my paycheck – not to mention having to support our deployed systems in the future, I simply cant take the chance that when another Codeigniter update rolls out, none of our legacy code will work.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Phil