March 29th, 2007
Video tutorials are a great way to learn, which is why I built my own video tutorial for CodeIgniter, and made it available online as a working demo application.
Well active CodeIgniter member, Elliot Haughin, has decided to raise the bar, and has started releasing a series of CodeIgniter video tutorials. The first one basic pages module had some audio trouble, but overall looked great. The second, Dynamic Routing, Models and Page Navigation has none of these problems, and the app is starting to come together nicely.
Another fantastic contribution, thanks Elliot! As in my tutorial, its great to see how other people do things, even if you might choose to differ away slightly.
Continue reading “More CodeIgniter video tutorials from the community”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Education with 2 comments 
March 20th, 2007
Digital Web Magazine has posted a great interview entitled Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site with Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain about his resdesigns of EllisLab, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and EngineHosting (I mentioned these earlier). Sure, the title of the article isn’t very creative, but the designs sure were!
In it, Jesse walk through the full process discussing workspace, wire-framing, concepts, mockups, typography, icons and more.
Continue reading “EllisLab rebuild interview on Digital Web Magazine”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 2 comments
March 08th, 2007
That’s right, the repositioning has happened, take a look for yourself!
It’s finally happened! Whew! The amount of work that’s gone into this by the whole team has been tremendous, but it was so worth it. The artist formerly known as pMachine, is now formally EllisLab. There is also now a more clear-cut distinction and cross branding between ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and EngineHosting. And each of the sites has a sexy new look. The stunning design cross-brands us, and is a sign of things to come!
Although all of areas (EE, CI and hosting) have seen tremendous growth, the update is especially welcome for CodeIgniter in my mind, who has grown from “new kid on the block”, into one of the “must-see” PHP frameworks that automatically gets consideration for most new PHP projects. Yeah there’s still some growing to do, but heck, its not like [http://www.zend.com]Zend[/url] has released anything except beta-versions of their framework (which is excellent by the way, but has different goals then CI).
One of my favourite new features of the website is the small area near the bottom labeled “Built on CodeIgniter”. Over the last little while I’ve been accruing a list of sites that are (um) built with CodeIgniter. There is some really great work going on out there. Now we show them off a little and feature the great work of the community.
Continue reading “pMachine becomes EllisLab with a sexy new look”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 9 comments
February 27th, 2007
I posted earlier about an article that James Nicol had up on this blog. The long awaited (well, long awaited for 6 days) article is now up, Real world apps with CodeIgniter: part II. Clever title!
He delves deeper into the black art of Code Ingiter, and discussing integrating with third party systems, validation, and my favourite understatement of the week.
Before we even went live the clients came back asking for more features...
<sarcasm>What!?! That hardly ever happens!</sarcasm>
At any rate, its a great read, and I hope James keeps writing!
Continue reading “Code Igniter in the Real World : Part 2”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, How-To, Noteworthy with 3 comments
February 21st, 2007
Code Igniter programmer, and good friend, James Nicol has written up a wonderful summary of his experience using Code Igniter in a production environment that he's called "Real world apps with CodeIgniter: part 1". His company developed a scheduling and logisitics management application for one of the candidates for the next US federal election (he isn't saying whom yet). His solution included building in table relationships, dynamic PDF generation, AJAX and javascript effects and CI used in a real-world app.
Continue reading “Code Igniter in the Real World”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, How-To, Noteworthy with 6 comments
January 23rd, 2007
Have I written the most useless helper Code Igniter will ever see? I think so.
It takes an arbitrary image and arbitrary text and builds an image out of them.
becomes 
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Which really doesn't do it justice until you see it full size, or run the demo. Here's a zoom.
- Completely impractical? CHECK!
- Chew up server and browser resources? CHECK!
- Fun to take images and overlay completely stupid slogans and sayings? BIG CHECK!
I should note that the helper handles colours just fine. Here's the rendered robot (2.7MB... be kind)
I proudly present the most useless helper ever written! The (useless) helper is available for download, and I've appropriately named it "useless_fun_helper". Run it just like you'd run any other helper.
$this->load->helper('useless_fun');
$txt = 'Code Igniter is an Open Source Web Application Framework that makes writing kick-ass PHP programs simple as apple pie';
$img = 'http://yourserver/ci_logo.jpg';
echo image_to_text($img, $txt); // typically you'd pass that into a view... I know... no hate mail ok
So this is my formal entry into the most useless helper of all time. Any runner-ups?
Continue reading “Most Useless Code Igniter Helper Ever?”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, PHP with 9 comments
December 30th, 2006
One of the very nice things about
CodeIgniter (and really all the PHP frameworks I've looked at) is the built in security tools. For example, CodeIgniter automatically cleans cookies, sessions, user input and URLs in addition to coming with a host of other built in tools to make your job in securing your application as easy as possible. But, like all good things, there is a trade off. In the case of security, the trade off is convenince. The more secure, the less convenient. Since security isn't really something we can compromise on, clever developers need to find alternate ways of implementing common things.
CodeIgniter for example limits the characters that one can use in a URL to letters, numbers, and "~, %, :, _ and -". A good collection sure, but what if you need to pass other characters, such as "(, ), =" or even spaces? Here's how I did it.
Continue reading “Passing Disallowed Characters through the URL in Code Igniter”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, How-To with 1 comment
December 26th, 2006
After a recent request for this, I’m re-posting the code to generate table captions in Code Igniter that I originally posted in the forums. Using it is very simple:
$this->table->set_caption()
Continue reading “Captions in HTML Table Class”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 1 comment
December 18th, 2006
One of the reasons I started getting active in the Code Igniter community was because of... um... well, the community. The people who are active are such interesting people, who give a lot of themselves back into the framework. You only need to look at the very active forums to see this happening. Community contributions are cropping up all over, including CIForge.com, as well as numerous independent efforts to educate and evangelize. People from all walks of life are drawn to Code Igniter, presumably for the same reason I was. It just plain rocks. It helps you build faster, it helps you build more organized, and it helps you build more securely.
In fact, CI is so sweet, that you could download the framework and never visit the site again, and be instantly more productive... but if you really want to push the bounds, then you need to spend some time in the community wiki. The wiki is a mysterious, fantastic place - and if you can sort through the disorganization and flux, there are some real treats in there. In fact, nearly every project I've built has used something from the wiki*. So in no particular order, here are my top eight, wiki resources.
Continue reading “Top 8 Code Igniter Wiki Resources”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 11 comments
December 03rd, 2006
I've had a few requests asking how I built my RSS feed since I'm using a custom built Code Igniter blogging system. Actually, it was pretty straight forward, but I thought I'd take a few moments to outline step by step how I did it.
Continue reading “Building an RSS Feed in Code Igniter”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, How-To with 6 comments
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