Building with CodeIgniter: Beginning your Tumblelog
by Kenny Meyers
Editors Note: I’d like to welcome back Kenny Meyers as a guest author on EE Insider. Kenny is a web developer at Seattle, WA based Blue Flavor. He loves ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter for their “less is more” approach and the ability to generate good, clean standards-compliant markup. He will be writing a series of articles on building a simple web application with CodeIgniter.
In my previous article, we went over the basics of CodeIgniter. Now we’re going to actually build something. For this four-part series we’ll build a tumblelog using many of the features CodeIgniter has built-in as well as third-party libraries.
A tumblelog is more then just a blog, it’s your lifestream; your tweets, your bookmarks and your blog posts. To keep this series simple we’ll be building a basic Tumblelog that allows you to post blog posts, grab your delicious bookmarks and show your tweets.
To begin, we must first install CodeIgniter.
Requirements
- PHP 5
- CodeIgniter
- Apache
- MySQL 5
I also suggest you have
- A MySQL Admin Tool. I love Querious http://www.araelium.com/querious/ but if you’re flyin’ on the cheap, Sequel Pro (http://www.sequelpro.com/) or the MySQL Admin Tool (especially for Windows) work well.
- A great text editor. I use Textmate; e-Text Editor for Windows works well, but really it’s your preference.
- MAMP or WampServer for easy local hosting.
Getting Started
The first thing we need to do is to make sure we have the CodeIgniter framework. To do this download the latest files from the CodeIgniter website. There’s a giant download button that should service you well. Then, simply copy these files to the root of your server. In a production environment, you would not want to leave the “system” folder in the site root, but instead move it below. For our purposes (and for brevity) we’ll skip over this and refer you to the CodeIgniter Forums for best practices.
If you’ve copied the files over and are looking at your server, you should see something like this:
Welcome Screen for CodeIgniter
The next step is to rename the application folder to the name of our application. For this project I’ve asked the clever gnomes to come up with a name and they have returned with “tumbleupon.” So go into your system folder that came with the the CodeIgniter framework and rename name application to tumbleupon. When we do this, we have to change the value of the $application_folder variable in the index.php located in the site root. On line 43 of index.php edit this line:
$application_folder = "application";
To match your application folder name. In our case this line becomes:
$application_folder = "tumbleupon";
Setting up the database
I’m going to use a GUI to create a database, and if you know the command line or MySQL and are comfortable creating your own database, please do so. I’m going to create a database called “ci_tumbleupon.” I’ll be using the root user for this example, but, please, in a production environment create a separate user with limited permissions. I refer you to this great article on MySQL practices.
Now there are a couple more configuration items to setup. Go to /system/tumbleupon/config/database.php and enter your hostname, database, username and password. For my example, I’m using a local install of MAMP, so it looks like:
$db['default']['hostname'] = "localhost";
$db['default']['username'] = "root";
$db['default']['password'] = "root";
$db['default']['database'] = "ci_tumbleupon";
If you would like to use a different database driver, it’s up to you, but MySQL is what we’re doing here.
Creating your homepage controller
CodeIgniter is controller-heavy, so it makes sense to start from the controller’s perspective and work from there. Fortunately for us, CodeIgniter comes with a homepage controller called welcome.php in your controllers directory under applications. We are going to rename the controller tumble_upon.php and this will control our homepage.
Then, we will change our code from:
<?php
class Welcome extends Controller {
function Welcome()
{
parent::Controller();
}
function index()
{
$this->load->view('welcome_message');
}
}
/* End of file welcome.php */
/* Location: ./system/tumbleupon/controllers/welcome.php */
to:
<?php
class Tumble_upon extends Controller {
public function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
}
public function index()
{
$this->load->view('home');
}
}
/* End of file tumble_upon.php */
/* Location: ./system/tumbleupon/controllers/tumble_upon.php */
What changed?
- We changed the class name to reflect the filename. This is important, as well as capitalization. The underscore is not, you can use whichever naming method you prefer.
- Functions now properly declare their access levels. “public” instead of just “function”. The reason for this is to follow good coding practices. Eventually, we will use multiple scopes (“private” and “protected” are the others) to perform functionality that only our class or objects need to access.
- The End of file and Location at the bottom. This is important to remember and easy to forget. Once again, just for implementing good coding practices.
- Changed function
Welcome()andparent::Welcome()to__construct()andparent::__construct(). Constructor methods are a little advanced for our purposes, but there is abstraction with the PHP 5__construct()that may come in handy when we modify this code later. - We changed the
$this->load->viewmethod parameter tohome. This loads the view we’re going to make in the next step.
There you have it your first Controller, but it’s not going to do much without…
Your first view.
Create a file in the views directory called home.php and paste the following code.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Welcome to TumbleUpon</title>
</head>
<body id="home" onload="">
<h1>{hello:world}!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Yes, it’s a “hello, world” reference, but hey, why break convention? We’ve now created our first view, which the Tumble_upon class will load, but if you go to your homepage you’ll see this:
CodeIgniter 404 page
Uh oh. You broke it. No, actually you’re not following CodeIgniter’s URL pattern. So, in order to correctly view your site you need to go to yoursiteurl.com/index.php/tumble_upon/ (See the URLs link above on how to remove index.php). It works!
Wait, but isn’t this supposed to be the homepage?
Yes, it is, and to do this we need to override CodeIgniter’s default URL handling. Fortunately, CodeIgniter makes it easy. All we have to do is go to /config/routes.php and change
$route['default_controller'] = "welcome";
to
$route['default_controller'] = "tumble_upon";
Load up your site’s homepage and you should see your hard work.
Coming up…
In the next article, we will build the blog functionality of our Tumblelog.
Posted on Jun 01, 2009
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Matthew Pennell — 06:19 on 06.01.2009
Nice start, Kenny. Is it worth mentioning why you’ve chosen to use PHP5 (i.e. which features you’re going to use that rely on it)? New CI users might not realise that they can also use CI even if their host doesn’t provide PHP5 support.
Kenny Meyers — 06:30 on 06.01.2009
Hey Matthew,
Great Question!
There are lots of reasons for using PHP 5 and why I chose it.
1. I think anything older then IE6 shouln’t be taught as a best practice in 2009.
2. PHP 5 offers better Object-Oriented Support
3. PHP 5 is a better iteration of the language
4. While I understand CodeIgniter is PHP 4 compatible, I view these articles as training new people or front-end people. This means making sure they’re up to date on the latest, best practices of which PHP 4 is not.
5. If people don’t have PHP 5 on their hosting service I hope it encourages them to get it. Mosts hosts I know of now offer that option.
6. PHP 4 needs to die.
7. If their host doesn’t carry it, they can develop and learn locally, then switch hosts.
Hopefully that answers your question!
Cheers,
Kenny
Jeff — 06:33 on 06.01.2009
Ok, that was easy enough. When is the nest one due?
Kenny Meyers — 06:35 on 06.01.2009
Depends on Mr. Ryan-to-the-Irelan’s schedule and mine but we’re going to try to keep them very close together.
Philip Zaengle — 05:47 on 06.02.2009
Great article, thanks for taking the time to write it! Looking forward to the next installment.
Dave — 17:32 on 06.02.2009
As you’ve changed your application folder name. You need to do a little extra house keeping and update your end of file comment.
/* End of file tumble_upon.php */
/* Location: ./system/tumbleupon/controllers/tumble_upon.php */
Kenny Meyers — 17:45 on 06.02.2009
Dave you strike again! I even re-doubled my efforts for fear of the other article’s slip-up. I live in ever present fear of your comment on an article I write to show my inadequacy!
I’ve emailed Ryan, thanks again for your help.
Cheers,
Kenny
Jared Cornwall — 20:34 on 06.04.2009
Always like to find good articles on CodeIgnter. Look forward to the rest of the series.
Anne Hathaway — 21:24 on 06.04.2009
What I need to know is why you write like a second grader?
Thanks!!
Kenny Meyers — 21:37 on 06.04.2009
@Anne Hathaway
Ouch!
If you could give me corrections, that’d be great.
Loved you in “Rachel Getting Married”.
Cheers,
Kenny
Anne Hathaway — 22:10 on 06.04.2009
Kenny,
Thanks! Like you, I love my work! Its the most important thing to me. Its what gets me out of bed in the morning!
I’ll work up a list of corrections and post them here. My mom was a schoolteacher you know!
Thanks again!
Edemilson Lima — 16:42 on 10.31.2009
Where can I find the next part?
Herb — 10:12 on 01.31.2010
SWEET! great article, and it really helped.
(coming from a noob)
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