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

Caching pages


By now, we're writing some pretty complex code. The server has to sit down and puzzle out each dynamically generated page. While it's simple for you to write a function like the show_errors, shown previously, the poor old server has to do more work as a result.

Sometimes, this can lead to your pages taking a longer time to load than you would like. There may be no way out of this. If you're writing a report that will be different each time then you just have to wait. However, you may be generating a page that will remain the same for a while. A blog, for instance, remains the same until you put another entry on it. If your blog gets a thousand views a day, on a day when you didn't add a new posting, each view will be the same. And it's a waste of time, for the system, to regenerate the same page over and over.

The way out of this is to cache the page. You generate the page once, and the HTML produced is saved in a cache file with a timestamp, as well as being returned to someone...