Sparks is a package management system for Codeigniter designed to make it easier to share, find and install libraries for the framework. You can browse the libraries shared on Sparks here.
Here are the Sparks team’s reasons for the project’s existence:
- There are plenty of feature requests for CodeIgniter, especially when it comes to libraries. 99% of the suggested libraries don’t belong built-in to the framework. We hope that Sparks helps keep CodeIgniter one of the lightest, fastest frameworks for PHP.
- Some fantastic and useful libraries have been written for CodeIgniter, but they remain scattered around the internet on blogs, wikis, forums, and github. Using these in your projects is a chore of copy and paste.
- When you’re thinking of using someone else’s code, there isn’t much of a way to gauge whether it’s ready for the big-time. Is it fault tolerant? Unit tested? Reletively recent?
- Most importantly: CodeIgniter developers don’t have an easy way to share their code and contribute extensions to CodeIgniter functionality.
And here’s a video that explains how Sparks work:
