January 18th, 2010
There’s been some really neat activity on the CodeIgniter front recently. Great stuff.
Jamie Rumbelow has taken over as CodeIgniter Community Cheiftain, after an admirable job by the imminent Michael Wales. We’re lucky to have both as part of our community.
Rick Ellis has discovered Twitter (see him @rickellis) and is dropping all kinds of cool news about CI and EllisLab.
The CodeIgniter repository itself is getting a bit more love recently due to a few folks putting in their own time. Here’s how I spent my weekend (check out both the time (yup, 3am) and message of rev 1789 :)
There’s a lot of exciting things ahead for the framework - its a great time to be involved!
Continue reading “CodeIgniter update, Jan 2010”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 10 comments 
November 05th, 2009
Last week my good friends over at EE_Insider focused on the imminent release of EE 2.0. If you haven’t read it yet, go read it now. They feature articles, interviews, and news, and always with a bit of humour (yes Kenny…. there’s a “u” in that word). They asked me for an interview, but after EECI2009 my wife and I took a few more days to tour around Holland… and l long story short… the interview only got finished right now :)
Go read EE 2 Week Straggler: The Return of Derek Allard! (Interview) for my thoughts on the future of CodeIgniter, the development of EE 2.0, and what it means to unite CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine.
We had sent out a set of interview questions that we weren’t sure we would receive for ExpressionEngine 2 Week. Derek Allard, one of EllisLab’s developers, was on vacation. Since he’d been slaving away for years on EE 2, we gave him a free pass. But Derek is what the kids call a “trooper” and he came back to us this week with the answers! It turned out to be a really great interview, timely due to the discussion and popularity of CodeIgniter and EE, and we got permission from the ‘Lab to post it. So, EE denizens, it’s my pleasure to give you our interview with the great Derek Allard
Continue reading “EE 2 Week Straggler: The Return of Derek Allard! (Interview)”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Personal with no comments
September 17th, 2009
The CodeIgniter manual is almost universally praised by the community*. I’m proud to say that we work very hard on our documentation at EllisLab - in fact as a coder, I’m forced to write the docs for anything I add or change. This means that they are pretty up to date, and reasonably complete. Could things be better? Of course! There’s always room to improve anything, and our docs are no exception.
What I’d like to focus on here is how to go about improving the docs, and one approach to giving your suggestion the best possible chance of getting included.
Continue reading “Getting changes made to the CodeIgniter manual”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 22 comments
July 26th, 2009
If you’re building a distributed application one of the luxuries you lack is knowing exactly how the server that will be hosting your application is configured. One common obstacle I encounter is lack of JSON support (JSON is only natively available to PHP since version 5 version 5.2, and even then is not uniformly available on servers). Here’s how I code around this situation; firstly, if the server does support JSON, then I don’t want to mess with it, but if it lacks support for JSON, then we need to define the JSON functions so it can use them externally. There are 2 JSON functions that we want to re-create - json_decode(), and json_encode().
Often times these types of things are set using configuration variables (in CodeIgniter, the $config array), but a configuration variable in this case is not really desirable, as a server may get the ability afterwards, or the person implementing it may not set the variable correctly. What I do in order to ensure the system will guess correctly is simply use PHP’s native function_exists() function to determine if the server can handle JSON. If it cannot, then I re-implement all the functions using the PEAR Json_services file, which I implement as a CodeIgniter library.
// Not all servers will have json_decode() available but those that do should
// use it, and we'll fall back to another solution for those who don't.
if ( ! function_exists('json_decode'))
{
$this->load->library('Services_json');
}
The library is available from the Pear repository and will work in any environment that CodeIgniter itself works in, simply drop it into your libraries folder.
function codeigniter_controller ()
{
if ( ! function_exists('json_decode'))
{
$this->load->library('Services_json');
}
$json = '{"a":1,"b":2,"c":3,"d":4,"e":5}';
$vars['json'] = json_decode($json);
$this->load->view('view', $vars);
}
I’ve used this technique successfully now across several CodeIgniter projects.
Continue reading “Using JSON on servers without native support”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, PHP with 5 comments
June 09th, 2009
I’m very pleased to announce I’ll be joining Leslie Camacho, Simon Collison, Veerle Pieters and a host of other brilliant minds at the the first ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter Conference in Leiden (Netherlands) at the end of October.
What doubly excites me about the entire conference (well… aside from the whole European vacation thing) is that they are specifically focusing on both of my favourite tools, not only EE or only CI, but both. The topics are balanced, the conference is very well organized so far… this will be a pleasure.
If you don’t already have plans, why not take a few extra days and make a vacation of it; and join us for several days of nerding out.
Continue reading “I’m speaking at the first ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter Conference”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine with 17 comments
November 11th, 2008
EllisLab is hiring an ExpressionEngine Technical Support Specialist. I won’t bore you with the job specifics (you can already follow a link and are literate) but I will say that 3 out of the 4 people doing development started in the support team (the forth fourth is Rick… who apparently founded the company or something), as well as the Director of Community Services. I’ll also tell you that its fun, the EllisLab staff are awesome, and working on the product is rewarding. If you are a CodeIgniter user and thinking about it, drop me a line, I’d be happy to answer questions. The truth is, aptitude and attitude are universally more important then experience (although, that goes a long way to help). Its a part-time position, so you can get your foot in the door, and still keep freelancing if you wish.
Continue reading “EllisLab hiring to the support team”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine with 3 comments
October 29th, 2008
In no particular order, here are some things that I’ve found interesting, useful, or funny. Mostly useful.
Fluid
A Site Specific Browser (SSB) that you can use to run web applications in. I use it for BambooInvoice, ExpressionEngine and Campfire. It rocks my socks. Find it at http://fluidapp.com/.
Growl Notifications with messages for campfire and fluid
I tried using Pyro as a client for Campfire, but it didn’t go so well. It looks like promising software, but for now… wasn’t working. Enter my favourite app from above, Fluid handles it like a champ, but one thing that was bugging me was the lack of Growl notifications (if you aren’t using Growl yet and are on a Mac, go install it right now). First result in Google was Growl Notifications with messages for campfire and fluid. :: sniff ::... its like they read my mind.
Also useful is the Fluid Icons Flickr group. I’ve got to get one for BambooInvoice into there…
DataMapper
DataMapper is an Object Relational Mapper written in PHP for CodeIgniter. It is designed to map your Database tables into easy to work with objects, fully aware of the relationships between each other. Well documented and with a loyal following, it looks like Simon Stenhouse has a real winner on his hands. I’m hoping to find time to really sift through the code but so far haven’t had the chance.
[edit: And D’oh! I was a fool for not also mentioning IgnitedRecord at the same time! Thanks for the comment m4rw3r.]
Sequel Pro
Sequel Pro is a desktop program for managing your MySQL databases. It runs beautifully, and I think I’ve mentioned it before, but was asked again recently about it. The only catch I found is that with Mamp I needed to set the “socket” to “/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock” when connecting.
ExpressionEngine Plugin: SS Friendly 404
The SS Friendly 404 plugin suggests relevant pages to users on your 404 page. It is used in your 404 template and returns suggested weblog entries based on the final segment of the 404 URL. Well documented and cleanly implemented. Well done!
jQuery Pumpkin
Found in the jQuery blog, the jQuery pumpkin had me smiling for 30 minutes.
Continue reading “Fluid, Campfire, DataMapper and useful links”. Posted in
Browsers, CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Mac with 11 comments
October 23rd, 2008
CodeIgniter 1.7.0 just released. Get it while it’s hot! New validation library, greatly enhanced form validation, some sexy loader enhancements and “whacks” of fixes including significant work in active record. For a list of all changes please see the change log. My personal favourite is this bug which I was proud to squash:
Fixed an edit from 1.6.3 that made the $robots array in user_agents.php go poof.
“Poof” you see… is the technical word for what was experienced. Now that’s good developin’ fella! Official announcement is here… but its not nearly as colourful as this post.
Continue reading “CodeIgniter 1.7.0 Released”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 14 comments
August 26th, 2008
It is often said, but one of the great things about the CodeIgniter project is the community that sprung up around it. Hardworking, smart, insightful, patient people. A true “open source” community willing to share in their time, expertise and enthusiasm. Too often these people don’t get the recognition they deserve. I just wanted to take a moment to mention one that I’ve always admired - FreakAuth.
FreakAuth is mostly driven by danfreak and grahack. The project is well documented, highly popular, and frankly, very useful. The kind of project we’re lucky to have. Show your appreciation by dropping them a “thank you” or as I did, make a small donation to a worthwhile project.
Thanks Dan and Grahack.
Continue reading “Freakauth : community driven CodeIgniter authentication”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 8 comments
August 21st, 2008
An oft-requested feature has been implemented in CodeIgniter’s session class. If you use a database to store your session info, then all user data will now be in the database, rather then an encrypted cookie. From the subversion repository’s changelog
Updated the Sessions class so that any custom data being saved gets stored to a database rather than the session cookie (assuming you are using a database to store session data), permitting much more data to be saved.
More details available in the manual. Please read the svn upgrading instructions, as a new field needs to be added to the database for this.
Continue reading “CodeIgniter session changes when using a database”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 15 comments
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