Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7

Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7

Overview of this book

CodeIgniter (CI) is a powerful open-source PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. CodeIgniter is an MVC framework, similar in some ways to the Rails framework for Ruby, and is designed to enable, not overwhelm. This book explains how to work with CodeIgniter in a clear logical way. It is not a detailed guide to the syntax of CodeIgniter, but makes an ideal complement to the existing online CodeIgniter user guide, helping you grasp the bigger picture and bringing together many ideas to get your application development started as smoothly as possible. This book will start you from the basics, installing CodeIgniter, understanding its structure and the MVC pattern. You will also learn how to use some of the most important CodeIgniter libraries and helpers, upload it to a shared server, and take care of the most common problems. If you are new to CodeIgniter, this book will guide you from bottom to top. If you are an experienced developer or already know about CodeIgniter, here you will find ideas and code examples to compare to your own.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
CodeIgniter 1.7
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Organizing the files of our site


From the start CI gives you something very useful. Just after downloading it and decompressing the ZIP file you download, you have a structure to work with, We can also separate the framework part from our application. Inside our application folder, where we will be working for most part, we can find:

At first sight we can think it is a tight structure that will make working more difficult, but we have learned that it will help us organize our project. Also it is a well thought out structure, very similar to that found in other frameworks. Having a good structure is a key point in every project as it will help us know where our files are, and hence where our code is placed. Benefits of this structure are:

  • Organized structure, that helps us find our files easily and in writing code

  • Helps with team work, as all the members know where to find and place the project files

  • Easy to update from one CI version to another, as our files and code are separated from the...