Internationalization and Partial Rendering in the CodeIgniter Framework

As experienced Web developers, it won’t shock you to find literally thousands of comparisons between CodeIgniter and the other popular frameworks you may be considering for your site. Each framework has its good and, ummm… less good points, but

Writing web applications with CodeIgniter – Part 3

We built a simple to-do list application last week by implementing the CI basics we learnt in first part of this tutorial. Today, let’s go over some of the things that will allow you to customise and extend the CI framework for your specific needs.

Changing the default URL routing

As we have already seen, CI parses the URLs in the following format:

example.com/className/functionName/variable1/variable2

While this suits most of the times, sometimes we might want to tweak CI to handle things different. With a reference to the blog example we saw in the first part, say, we want to display the entries of a blog by accessing a URL along the lines of "example.com/post/postID". Here, we actually want the "postID" to be parsed as a variable rather than a function name.

CI allows us to make such tweaks by allowing us to write our own routing rules. These rules are defined in application/config/routes.php file in an associative array called $route . The key of the associative array will define the URI to be matched, and its corresponding value will be the destination URI to which the request to be routed to. Apart from providing two…

Writing web applications with CodeIgniter – Part 2

Last week, we covered the basic structure of a CodeIgniter application. Let’s now jump right into developing a simple todo list application using CodeIgniter. We will be keeping the actual functionality of the application itself simple here, as the goal here is to give a good overview on what it takes to build a CI application from scratch.

Okay, the first thing you have to do is to download and extract the latest build of CodeIgniter. Next, download the controllers, models and views that I have used in this sample todo list application. You should refer to these files as you read the tutorial. Here is the demo of the sample application (use “demo” as username and password).

Directory structure

All the files related to our application will be placed in the "system/application" folder:

As you can see, we have to place our controllers, views and models in their correspondng /controllers, /views and /models directories. Initially, we will have a sample controller (Welcome) in the /controllers directory, and its corresponding Welcome view in the /views directory. The model directory will be empty.

The /config directory consists of various files which will help us…

Writing web applications with CodeIgniter: Part 1

CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that makes writing secure web applications a breeze. Being extremely light weighted, it’s an impressive toolkit which promotes the Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach to software development. CodeIgniter’s incredibly useful libraries, helpers and simplicity give you a sound foundation to quickly build your web apps on. This will be the first part of a series of tutorials focusing on CodeIgniter. Today, let’s get started with the basics of CodeIgniter and familiarize ourselves with the structure and semantics of a CI application.

I am assuming that you are already familiar with the MVC pattern, so let’s briefly see how it applies to a typical CI application.

View – A view is simply the content which a user sees rendered on a any page. It can be either a full web page, or even code snippets like the header or the footer of a web page. The view’s primary aim is to render data on the screen, which will be passed to it by a controller.

Controller – A controller handles the actual application logic. It acts as an intermediate between the View (front end) and the Model (the data). The controller, typically fetches records from…