Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development

By : Adam Griffiths
Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development

By: Adam Griffiths

Overview of this book

<p>CodeIgniter is an open source PHP framework with a small footprint and exceptional performance. It gives you a rich set of libraries for common tasks, with a simple interface to access them. There are several unexplored aspects of CodeIgniter that can help developers build applications more easily and quickly. In this book, you will learn the intricacies of the framework and explore some of its hidden gems.<br /><br />If you want to get the most out of CodeIgniter, this book is for you. It teaches you what you need to know to use CodeIgniter on a daily basis. You will create mini-applications that teach a specific technique and let you build on top of the base. <br /><br />This book will take you through developing applications with CodeIgniter. You will learn how to make your CodeIgniter application more secure than a default installation, how to build large-scale applications and web services, how to release code to the community, and much more. You will be able to authenticate users, validate forms, and also build libraries to complete different tasks and functions.<br /><br />The book starts off introducing the framework and how to install it on your web server or a local machine. You are introduced to the Model-View-Controller design pattern and how it will affect your development. Some important parts of the CodeIgniter Style Guide are included to keep CodeIgniter development as standardized as possible; this helps greatly when working as part of a team or taking on an old CodeIgniter project. You will quickly move on to how CodeIgniter URLs work and learn about CodeIgniter-specific files such as helpers and plugins. By the time you finish this book, you will be able to create a CodeIgniter application of any size with confidence, ease, and speed.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Input and Security Class


The Input and Security Class sanitizes all global data and filters all POST and COOKIE data to ensure that only alphanumeric characters are present. We've already used this class when we built our contact form, but there are a few things that we didn't cover.

XSS filtering

The Input and Security Class comes with a Cross Site Scripting hack prevention filter, which can be run on a per-item basis, or can be set to filter all POST and COOKIE data automatically. It is not set to run by default because it has a small processing overhead and is not always needed in every case.

The XSS filter works by looking for JavaScript that can be run on the page to hijack cookies or in other cases with malicious intent. All XSS found will be rendered safe by converting it into HTML entities.

Filtering a single item

This is mainly a recap: To filter POST or COOKIE data for Cross Site Scripting exploits, you run the data through the filter as shown:

$name = $this->input->xss_filter...