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


We've now used CI to build some very sophisticated tools for our website, which give it some significant functionality.

Firstly, we used CI's ftp class to simplify and automate file transfer operations. Initially, we've just used this class to check the files we expect to find on our site, to see that nothing unexpected has been added. This is a valuable check, as many of the problems websites throw at you involve unexpected alterations of files—usually by site admins and sometimes by hackers. This function will regularly check our remote websites and also offers the possibility of remote maintenance and updating the sites.

Then we looked at developing our own private web services using CI's XML-RPC classes. These allow us to automatically call functions on a remote site, pass parameters if necessary, and have the results returned to us—the same as if we were logged on to the remote site, instead of our test site. We used this to have the remote site optimize a table in its database...