I am still having issues with MB  - and apparently others are too view thread.  So, I am once again switching back to HMVC / Modular Extensions.. With that switch I am also converting the Simpletest module as well as my Tag and Template libraries over as well..

I’ll release them soon (this month…. really)

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So, I am primarily writing this pre-post as incentive for myself to have a deadline and accountability.

After reading Jaime Rumbelow’s post on Codeigniter and Simpletest I realized I needed a way to do TDD in my Matchbox modules without having to set everything up each time.

I have an almost ready matchbox simpletest module that scans other modules for tests and auto runs them.   Each module you want to build with TDD only needs to contain its tests (which can  run on their own by loading the simpletest lib from the simpletest module) or can be auto loaded in batch from the main simpletest module.

If you are interested in helping me beta test, let me know – i plan to release a beta somewhere around Feb 1.

I downloaded the release candidate from http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Matchbox/, dropped it into a new branch of some projects that use the old version, and was off and running.

As i play with it more i plan to release some of our code like the AMFPHP library as self contained modules that can be dropped into an application.

Thanks again to Zacharias for all your hard work.

Phil

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