Category Archives: PHP

It’s been about a year since I selected CodeIgniter as my framework of choice, and 3 or 4 projects later I can say with sincerity that I have never looked back.

With the benefit of hindsight I want to go over some of the reasons why moving to a framework (or perhaps a better framework) is a great choice for any programmer once they have a grasp on the fundamentals of PHP.

Proper MVC gives method to mayhem

I used to think I got MVC architecture, but it wasn’t until I delved into CI that I started to really understand how its supposed to look and feel, and why the correct structure is so beneficial to an application.

The way that CI is predictably structured means that debugging is almost fun. There is such a distinct pattern of organisation that finding a gremlin is as easy as looking at the URL and going directly to the responsible controller and method. This carries across projects and across developers.

Gone are the days of following breadcrumbs off to some other obscure part of the application (they don’t really exist anymore) – at worst you would find yourself in a library or helper file which is easily tracked down to a predictable location from the controller level (and generally speaking very well documented).

[On the topic of debugging I will give a curteous nod to CI's error handling capabilities when in development mode as well.]

Reasonable code organisation is imposed on you to an extent that you probably are in the wrong industry if you manage to make a mess of things.

Not to mention models. Sure, I still have some confusion about how to deal with multiple table joins in an elegant way given the supposed “one model per table” rule, but at least … Read more

After a fair bit of trawling Google, I got the impression that setting up a cron job in codeigniter was going to be a bit tricky.

The two potential solutions I discovered were:

1. execute the “wget” command to replicate a normal browser request, which then exposes my cron functionality to the big wide world and creates some additional unnecessary overheads, or
2. Create a bespoke front controller a bit like the existing index.php but specifically for cron jobs

Neither of these options sound particularly ideal to me, and thankfully, there is a better way (and it turned out to be a case of RTFM).

Firstly, just create a normal controller. I creatively called mine Cron.

Note the call to $this->input->is_cli_request() which ensures that this controller cannot be accessed directly from a url.

Next we setup our cron job as you would any other, except that you provide the path in a special format.

php /path/to/index.php controller_name method_name ["params"]

The first part is either the command “php” or your server path to php.

The second part is the absolute path to your CI front controller, eg. /path/to/index.php.

The third part is the controller name, followed by the method name, followed by optional parameters.

The CI manual gives the example:

php /path/to/index.php cron foo

If that doesn’t work you might need to specify your path to php. I set mine as follows:

/usr/local/bin/php -f /home/clinic/public_html/index.php cron foo

You can even pass parameters in quotes, which have the same effect as parameters in regular url requests!

/usr/local/bin/php -f /home/clinic/public_html/index.php cron foo “beer”

… Read more

I’ve been looking into the CodeIgniter PHP framework (CI)  for a couple of weeks and want to document some of the surprises and caveats I have discovered. Coming from a non-framework background, I was surprised at how similar the CI conventions are to my own pseudo “framework” that I use on my projects – so I guess I must’ve been doing something right so far!

This is what i’ve learnt.

CI is backwards compatible with PHP4

Which, in my opinion is something they should rectify – ie. retire support in the next major release and move forward. From what I have read about CI vs Kohana (a CI fork), it seems that CI is sacrificing pretty autoloading simply because they remain backwards compatible.

Edit: This is actually incorrect, as of version 2.0.2 the minimum required version of PHP is 5.1.6. Thats to Dale for pointing this out in the comments.

The MVC structure is superb, however…

Alot of tutorials i’ve watched lean towards using helper functions within views, such as for forms. From a developer perspective thats fine, however you can imagine a designer having problems with form_open() when he wants to add a simple class or ID. The upside is that they are just helpers – if you don’t like them, don’t use them.

Speaking of functions

I was surprised to discover the folder full of procedural helper functions. This is nice in terms of using functions anywhere inside the application, although it does seem a little out of place in an OOP framework. It would be nice to see these converted into classes.

Default session security is awful

Usually a PHP session’s data is stored server side and only a small cookie is kept client side to track a user session. However in CI, the session data is stored client … Read more