JoshSweeney

First Days with CodeIgniter and MVC

I have begun the research and studying that will be required to rewrite SecurityDistro.com. This research has lead me to believe that the most efficient way to start would be with a PHP framework.

I started by looking through a few common frameworks, their install process, and their documentation. The search began with Zend, CodeIgniter, and Symfony. I installed each one and started looking into what it would take for someone like myself to learn MVC using these frameworks. My requirements were that it needed to be an easy introduction to MVC and that it wouldn’t require me to start from scratch on SecurityDistro.com. I wanted to make incremental improvements to the site as I learned the framework.

At first glance Zend appeared to be a hodge podge of different libraries which would require me to do a good bit of work just to start playing with it. I could be wrong but this was my first impression.

Symfony was actually my first choice in frameworks but when I started going through the Propel ORM setup which appears to be required for Symfony I decided that I didn’t want to spend the next 2 weeks learning an ORM tool before I got started in the framework.

Last on the list was CodeIgniter. From the description it was lightweight and would require little setup to get going. The description of the framework was oddly accurate. I installed CodeIgniter in a subdirectory on my test box and was viewing the default index page in just a few minutes. CodeIgniter also offers two “getting started” style video tutorials that are fairly short and very helpful. After watching the videos and playing around a bit I started looking through the documentation. The documentation provided was straight forward and gave easy to understand instructions on how to use the various resources provided by the framework.

After watching the tutorials and browsing the documentation I started to write a little code. This quickly led me to more questions including how to get the index.php segment out of the middle of my URL. A little searching provided this tutorial which was exactly what I was looking for. The tutorial walked through the best way to rewrite the URL in order to have a nice clean URL.

My next issue was MVC structure. Since I have never worked on an MVC application I was in the dark about the structure and how things were supposed to be designed. I knew what the M, V, and C stood for and did but had no idea how the data flowed between them. Turning back to the CodeIgniter documentation I found a nice little diagram to get me started. This got me moving in the correct direction but after more coding I can already tell that MVC application structure will need to be added to my required reading list.

I have now started reading an older CodeIgniter book called CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development. So far it has been very informative even though it is somewhat out of date.

Tags: codeigniter, framework, php