This book sets out to explain some of the main features of CI. It doesn't cover them all, or cover any of them in full detail. CI comes with an excellent on-line User Guide that explains most things. This is downloaded with the CI files.
This book doesn't try to duplicate the User Guide. Instead it tries to make it easier for you to pick up how the CI framework works, so you can decide whether it is right for you, and start using it quickly.
In some places, this book goes beyond the User Guide, though, when it tries to explain how CI works. (The User Guide is more practically oriented.) This means that there are some fairly theoretical chapters in between the "here's how" pages. I've found that it helps to understand what CI is doing under the hood; otherwise you sometimes get puzzling error messages that aren't easy to resolve.
I've tried to use a 'real-world' example when showing sections of CI code. I want to show that CI can be used to develop a serious website with a serious purpose. I'm currently running several websites for clients, and I want a program that will monitor them, test them in ways I specify, keep a database of what it has done, and let me have reports when I want them.
The examples in this book don't show it in full detail, of course: but they do, I hope, demonstrate that you can use CI to make pretty well any common coding simpler, and some uncommon stuff as well.
This book steps you through the main features of CodeIgniter in a systematic way, explaining them clearly with illustrative code examples.
Chapter 1 explains what CodeIgniter can do, the 'framework', and how CodeIgniter fits in. It further talks about the open-source business model and gives some disadvantages of CodeIgniter, at the end.
Chapter 2 explains what happens when you install the site, and which files will be created. It gives a detailed overview of the required software, and explains the basic configuration of CodeIgniter.
Chapter 3 explains how MVC helps to organize a dynamic website. It goes further to explain the process by which CodeIgniter analyzes an incoming Internet request and decodes which part of your code will handle it. Then CodeIgniter syntax rules and the different types of files or classes you can find—or write for yourself—on a CodeIgniter site are explained. At the end of the chapter, some practical hints on site design are given.
Chapter 4 looks at how you set up a database to work with CodeIgniter, and then how you use the Active Record class to manipulate the database.
Chapter 5 covers various ways of building views, how to create HTML forms quickly, and how to validate your forms using CodeIgniter's validation class.
Chapter 6 looks at one of the basic questions affecting any website i.e. session management and security; we also explore CodeIgniter's session class.
Chapter 7 covers the way in which CodeIgniter uses objects, and the different ways in which you can write and use your own objects.
Chapter 8 covers CodeIgniter classes to help with testing: Unit tests, Benchmarking, the 'profiler' and ways in which CodeIgniter helps you to involve your database in tests without scrambling live data.
Chapter 9 looks at using CodeIgniter's FTP class and email class to make communication easier, and then we venture into Web 2.0 territory using XML-RPC.
Chapter 10 talks about CodeIgniter classes that help in overcoming problems arising regularly when you are building a website, for example, the date helper, the text and inflector helpers, the language class, and the table class.
Chapter 11 looks at several useful CodeIgniter functions and helpers: file helper, download helper, file upload class, image manipulation class, and the ZIP class.
Chapter 12 covers exploring your config files, using diagnostic tools, and potential differences between servers, along with some notes on security.
Chapter 13 shows you how to generalize CRUD operations so that you can do them with two classes: one for the controller, and one for the CRUD model.
Chapter 14 looks at some coding examples, bringing together a lot of the functions that have been discussed bit by bit in the preceding chapters.
Chapter 15 looks at some of the resources available to you when you start to code with CodeIgniter, such as the libraries for AJAX and JavaScript, authentication, charting, and CRUD.
Throughout this book, we will assume that you have the following packages installed and available:
PHP 4.3.2 or above
A working web server
One of MySQL, MySQLi, MS SQL, Postgre, Oracle, SQLite, ODBC
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
$active_group = "default"; $db['default']['hostname'] = ""; $db['default']['username'] = ""; $db['default']['password'] = "";
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
</head> <body> <h1 class='test'><?php echo $mytitle; ?> </h1> <p class='test'><?php echo $mytext; ?> </p> </body>
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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