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

Session Class


The Session Class allows you to maintain a user's state as they browse your website. The Session Class stores data inside a cookie, which can optionally be encrypted. You are also able to store data inside a database for added security, as this means that the user's cookie must match the database record. By default only a cookie is used. If you enable the database option then you'll need to create a database table, by using the steps given next.

Note

The Session class doesn't make use of native PHP sessions. It uses it's own variation that utilizes cookies for storing data. You can optionally use a database to store all custom information as well. More on that is provided later in this chapter.

Initializing the Session Class

Sessions typically run globally upon each page load, so the Session Class must either be initialized by one of your Controllers, or be autoloaded by using CodeIgniter's autoload feature.

Autoload the Session Class

If you wish to autload the session class, simply...