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

Organizing the logic of our site


This is possible, thanks to the structure of CI, as for this to be possible we need to separate our code in more than one file. CI follows the MVC design pattern, which means that we have our code divided into:

  • A controller—as a central point of our code, where data manipulation and other data operations are carried

  • A model—to retrieve data from a database or databases

  • A view—or more if necessary, to present the code to our visitors

Again, at first this may seem tight to work with. But it is very convenient and will make our code more maintainable. For example, if we want to read the records from our users2 table, we will need three files, one for each—controller, model, view.

A model

To retrieve the data we will create a model:

<?php
class Users2_model extends Model
{
function get_users()
{
return $this->db->get('users2');
}
}

With the help of the Active Record we are able to retrieve our data in an easy way using the get function. We will place all...