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>

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CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development
Adam Griffiths
Apr, 2010 | 300 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development
CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with CodeIgniter
Getting Started with CodeIgniter
Upgrading from older versions of CodeIgniter
Downloading and installing CodeIgniter
Introducing Model View Controller (MVC)
Controllers: The business logic
Models: Data abstraction layer
Views: Your template files
Autoloading resources
Formatting your code—PHP Style Guide
CodeIgniter URLs
CodeIgniter specific files
Summary
2
Learning the Libraries
Learning the Libraries
What is a library?
What do libraries do?
Benchmarking Class
Input and Security Class
Email Class
File Uploading Class
Image Manipulation Library
Pagination Class
Session Class
Unit testing a class
Summary
3
Form Validation and Database Interaction
Form Validation and Database Interaction
Why should I validate my forms?
Using the Form Validation Library
Saving sets of validation rules to a config file
Using callbacks
Database interaction
Performing simple queries
Returning values
Result helper functions
Active Record
Active Record caching
Method chaining
Manipulating databases with Database Forge
Summary
4
User Authentication 1
User Authentication 1
Defining our goals
Creating and connecting to the database
Front end code
Model code
Addressing some issues
The Authentication Library
Summary
5
User Authentication 2
User Authentication 2
Using Twitter oAuth
Using Facebook Connect
Summary
6
Application Security
Application Security
CodeIgniter's defenses
Strong password policies
Storing passwords securely
Database security
Cross-site scripting (XSS)
Changing the default file structure
Staying up-to-date
Summary
7
Building a Large-Scale Application
Building a Large-Scale Application
Running benchmarks
Caching
Optimize SQL queries
Avoid disk activity
Run multiple application instances
Summary
8
Web Services
Web Services
What is a web service?
Types of web service
RESTful web service
Create a new post
Update a post
Delete a post
Get a blog post
Summary
9
Extending CodeIgniter
Extending CodeIgniter
Hooks
Extended controllers
Extended libraries
Custom libraries
Helpers
CodeIgniter's hidden gems
Summary
10
Developing and Releasing Code to the Community
Developing and Releasing Code to the Community
Find a need in the community (or fill your own need)
Search for existing solutions
Create a plan
Writing the library
Write a user guide
Release options
Handling database tables
Supporting the code
Summary
Index
Index

Custom libraries

Just as we can extend the native CodeIgniter Libraries, we can also create entirely new libraries and use them just as seamlessly as native libraries. We'll take our Account Model from earlier in the book and create a library out of it, and then add some extra features.

The features

The Authentication library will have the basic functions you would expect:

  • Login

  • Logout

  • Register

We'll leave the form validation stuff in our Controller, as we've already built that. We could contain all of the functionality, including the form views and form validation, in the library as I have done with my own open-source authentication library, but that seems like overkill—especially for the book format.

The library

The first thing to do is to create our Library file. Create a new file inside the /system/application/libraries/ folder, called Auth.php.

<?php

class Auth
{
  
  var $CI;

  function Account_model()
  {
    parent::Model();
    $this->CI->load->database();
    $this->CI...
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