This book takes you beyond the CodeIgniter user guide and into more advanced subjects that you need to know if you plan to use CodeIgniter on a daily basis. The book will teach you how to build libraries in order to complete different tasks and functions. You will create mini-applications each of which teaches a specific technique and builds on top of the CodeIgniter base. By the time that you finish this book you will be able to create a CodeIgniter application of any size with confidence, ease, and speed.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with CodeIgniter—This chapter guides you from installing CodeIgniter to learning about its URL structure, the MVC design pattern, helpers, plugins, and extending and replacing libraries.
Chapter 2, Learning the Libraries—You are taken through a number of the core CodeIgniter libraries, being introduced to each library, what it does and how you go about using it. Some libraries work together, and if this is the case, then this chapter explains how they can be used together.
Chapter 3, Form Validation and Database Interaction—Form validation is a task that some users find difficult. This chapter focuses on teaching you the correct way to validate your forms, by using the Form Validation library. You will also cover the Database library and Database Forge, a way to easily manage database tables.
Chapter 4, User Authentication 1—The first User Authentication chapter focuses on building your own authentication system. We build a model that handles the registration and logging in of users. We also include a function to check whether a user is logged in or not.
Chapter 5, User Authentication 2—The second and final User Authentication chapter focuses solely on user log-in in through Twitter oAuth and Facebook Connect. For each example the CodeIgniter code is explained, as well as how both company's APIs work, and to some extent how each differs from the other.
Chapter 6, Application Security—This chapter discusses how CodeIgniter is secure by design, for example, disallowing certain characters in the URI strings. We also go over what you can do to make your CodeIgniter application more secure than a default installation.
Chapter 7, Building a Large-Scale Application—This chapter takes you through some of the techniques that you can use to make your CodeIgniter application scalable. You learn about identifying bottlenecks via benchmarking results, caching, using better PHP functions, optimizing SQL queries, and using memcache and multiple application instances.
Chapter 8, Web Services—This chapter builds an example web service by using the REST principle. This includes a simple client library that issues requests, and a server library that deals with requests and responds as appropriate.
Chapter 9, Extending CodeIgniter—This chapter covers everything you need to know about extending CodeIgniter's default functionality without hacking at the core files. This is very useful, especially when it is time to upgrade to the newest version of CodeIgniter.
Chapter 10, Developing and Releasing Code to the Community—In this chapter you will learn how to release code to the community, gain exposure for your released code, and how to properly maintain the code and give good support to those using your code.
This book is written for advanced PHP developers with a good working knowledge of Object Oriented Programming techniques who are comfortable with developing applications and wish to use CodeIgniter to make their development easier, quicker and more fun. Basic knowledge of CodeIgniter will be helpful. This book will suit developers who fall into three categories:
Professional Developers—Employees of a software house or other type of development company
Freelance Developers—A sole developer working in the industry on their own
Just for fun Developer—A person using PHP to build web applications is their spare time for fun
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
[default] exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30) exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100) exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100) exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# cp /usr/src/asterisk-addons/configs/cdr_mysql.conf.sample /etc/asterisk/cdr_mysql.conf
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking on the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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