# CodeIgniter Features

Features in and of themselves are a very poor way to judge an application since they tell you nothing about the user experience, or how intuitively or intelligently it is designed. Features don’t reveal anything about the quality of the code, or the performance, or the attention to detail, or security practices. The only way to really judge an app is to try it and get to know the code. :doc:`Installing <../installation/>`_ CodeIgniter is child’s play so we encourage you to do just that. In the mean time here’s a list of CodeIgniter’s main features.

- Model-View-Controller Based System
- Extremely Light Weight
- Full Featured database classes with support for several platforms.
- Query Builder Database Support
- Form and Data Validation
- Security and XSS Filtering
- Session Management
- Email Sending Class. Supports Attachments, HTML/Text email, multiple protocols (sendmail, SMTP, and Mail) and more.
- Image Manipulation Library (cropping, resizing, rotating, etc.). Supports GD, ImageMagick, and NetPBM
- File Uploading Class
- FTP Class
- Localization
- Pagination
- Data Encryption
- Benchmarking
- Full Page Caching
- Error Logging
- Application Profiling
- Calendaring Class
- User Agent Class
- Zip Encoding Class
- Template Engine Class
- Trackback Class
- XML-RPC Library
- Unit Testing Class
- Search-engine Friendly URLs
- Flexible URI Routing
- Support for Hooks and Class Extensions
- Large library of “helper” functions