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

Centralized configuration


All the configuration needed by our application is kept in one folder, that is the config folder; this is very convenient and will make our application easy to configure. CodeIgniter doesn't need a lot of configuration, all we need to change can be found inside this folder. Among other files we can find:

  • autoload.php: Here we place the libraries, helpers, plugins, and so on. They will be loaded for every controller function throughout our application. Useful for autoloading database configuration or the libraries, helpers, and so on, you find that you are using a lot.

  • config.php: Our main configuration file, with important parameters such as base_url, charset, log, cache, and more.

  • database.php: Here our database configurations are kept, for as many databases as we need.

  • routes.php: URLs and other application routes are defined here. Our default controller is also defined here. This is a very important thing to add, as this is the default controller when no...