Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7

Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7

Overview of this book

CodeIgniter (CI) is a powerful open-source PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. CodeIgniter is an MVC framework, similar in some ways to the Rails framework for Ruby, and is designed to enable, not overwhelm. This book explains how to work with CodeIgniter in a clear logical way. It is not a detailed guide to the syntax of CodeIgniter, but makes an ideal complement to the existing online CodeIgniter user guide, helping you grasp the bigger picture and bringing together many ideas to get your application development started as smoothly as possible. This book will start you from the basics, installing CodeIgniter, understanding its structure and the MVC pattern. You will also learn how to use some of the most important CodeIgniter libraries and helpers, upload it to a shared server, and take care of the most common problems. If you are new to CodeIgniter, this book will guide you from bottom to top. If you are an experienced developer or already know about CodeIgniter, here you will find ideas and code examples to compare to your own.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
CodeIgniter 1.7
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Summary


This chapter brings together a few CI helpers and classes with similar themes. They help you to:

  • Write and read files on your system with minimal coding, while CI locks and unlocks the files in the background

  • Download files, rather than show them as HTML on the screen—with CI providing the HTTP headers and worrying about MIME types for you

  • Upload files to your site, allowing you to specify security constraints such as the size and type of files you allow

  • Easily manipulate images, to resize them

  • Compress your files before you download them to your users

This is what frameworks are all about. Instead of a lot of tedious coding, they let you get on with building an application that works. They give you a standard and easy interface, and worry about the details for you.