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

CodeIgniter's defenses


CodeIgniter comes with built-in security filters; some of these filters are by convention, and some need to be configured. We'll go over some of these now.

URI security

To refresh your memory, a URI is everything that comes after your web address. When using CodeIgniter, you will have a URI that looks like this:

index.php/controller/method/parameters

As a security precaution, CodeIgniter only allows certain characters in your URIs. You may only have the following characters in your URIs. You can change this in your application/config/config.php file, to add or remove any characters that should be allowed in your URIs; characters such as:

  • Lowercase and Uppercase letters

  • Numbers (0—9)

  • Tilde (~)

  • Underscore (_)

  • Dash (-)

  • Period (.)

  • Colon (:)

Why does CodeIgniter use URIs?

CodeIgniter favors URI segments to map URLs to Controller files for one simple reason. Using other methods—such as building query strings—is not search engine friendly and also creates some security issues.

For example...