Creating a Microsite Manager with CodeIgniter.pdf

Thomas Myer

Creating a

Manager with

CodeIgniter ®

Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Updates, source code, and Wrox technical support at www.wrox.com

Microsite

Contents

Introducing CodeIgniter

What’s Model-View-Controller?

Why Bother with MVC?

Installing and Configuring CodeIgniter

The Root Folder

The system/ Folder

The system/application Folder

Tweaking the Configuration

Getting Started

The Login Area

Creating the Template View

Creating the Login Form

Reworking the index() Function

Creating the MAdmins Model

Creating the verifyUser() Function

Autoloading the MAdmins Model

A Small Note about Creating Your First User

Creating the Admin Dashboard

Creating the Dashboard Controller

Building the Admin Area

Setting up the Site Builder

Conclusion

About Thomas Myer

Wrox Blox0 Creating a Microsite Manager with CodeIgniter By Myer - ISBN0 97804704133711 Prepared for CHRISTOPHER RINGWALD/

accordance with the WroxBlox Terms of Service. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without prior

written permission from the publisher. Redistribution or other use that violates the Wrox Blox Terms of Service or otherwise violates the

U.S. copyright laws is strictly prohibited.

Creating a Microsite

Manager with CodeIgniter®

A recent trend in online marketing has been the increased use of targeted microsites to deliver

information to prospects and customers. If you’re not familiar with the term, a microsite is a small

web site that is focused on a very narrow range of topics or that has a single goal (like introducing

prospects to a product line or gathering leads).

Most of the time, microsites are static sites with only a handful of pages and a few forms. They

may or may not include rich media like Flash and video. Just because they’re usually small and

tightly focused doesn’t mean that they’re one-shot deals. My experience has been that once a

marketing team strikes on the idea of building a microsite, they usually iterate over the content

and structure many times, because they have that freedom.

These iterative cycles can cause the seemingly simple goal of creating a microsite (after all, you’re

only talking about a few pages, right?) to disappear and instead be replaced by a confusing process

without any centralized control or logical workflow. Anyone who has seen a team of developers,

writers, designers, and subject matter experts (SMEs) trying to hammer out messaging for a

product rollout, while at the same time debating structure and trying to maintain publishing

control, knows that even the best intentions can be made into a hash in no time.

A good approach to the problem is to build some kind of microsite management tool that would

allow a team of marketers, writers, and developers to create a microsite and then publish the files

to a web server. In this Wrox Blox, I show you how to do just that.

You’re going to build a microsite manager using CodeIgniter, a PHP Model-View-Controller

(MVC) framework. Before getting into any of the details of MVC and CodeIgniter, let’s consider

the microsite manager itself. From a requirements perspective, the microsite manager should:

❑

Allow users to log in to a secure area.

❑

Allow users to organize content into folders or categories.

Wrox Blox0 Creating a Microsite Manager with CodeIgniter By Myer - ISBN0 97804704133711 Prepared for CHRISTOPHER RINGWALD/

accordance with the WroxBlox Terms of Service. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without prior

written permission from the publisher. Redistribution or other use that violates the Wrox Blox Terms of Service or otherwise violates the

U.S. copyright laws is strictly prohibited.

Creating a Microsite Manager with CodeIgniter®

❑

Allow users to create pages.

❑

Allow users to upload files and other media.

These requirements address the what (or the content) in the microsite, but eventually, the microsite

needs to be published to a target location. The developers may have little or no control over the target

environment. They may or may not, for example, be able to specify a type of database or even PHP

support. In fact, they may be publishing to an ASP or ColdFusion server, or to a server that only

supports basic HTML.

For these reasons, the microsite manager you build needs a publication function that extracts

information from the microsite database tables, applies templates to it, and then publishes the material to

a designated target, all as flat HTML. Once you have all of the material in HTML (with supporting assets

and media files, of course), you’re free to place that information on any web server you choose.

Introducing CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter was created by EllisLab, Inc. It is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework with a very

small footprint. In form and function, it is very similar to other MVC frameworks, like Ruby on Rails.

Like Ruby on Rails, it requires very little configuration to get started. I’ve been able to create prototype

applications within hours of talking to a client, and then refined the prototypes over the course of a

few days.

It’s this kind of prototyping power and flexibility, by the way, that will transform the way you work

with clients — but more on that later.

Unlike Ruby on Rails, CodeIgniter doesn’t require you to adhere to a strict set of coding rules. For

example, you don’t have to name your database tables a certain way and your models another. You don’t

even have to have strictly formatted table fields — which makes CodeIgniter an excellent platform for

recoding legacy applications.

Below are a few more great things about CodeIgniter:

❑

There is a growing toolbox of helpers and libraries that help you do your job quickly.

❑

You don’t have to learn a complex templating language.

❑

You don’t need to work with large-scale monolithic libraries.

❑

You can run your applications in PHP 4 or PHP 5 without too much hassle.

❑

CodeIgniter applications run with exceptional performance.

I won’t get into too many more details right now. You’ll start seeing the difference once you start coding.

For now, though, it might be useful to talk a little bit about MVC, and why it’s important. Then you can

get to work.

Wrox Blox0 Creating a Microsite Manager with CodeIgniter By Myer - ISBN0 97804704133711 Prepared for CHRISTOPHER RINGWALD/

accordance with the WroxBlox Terms of Service. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without prior

written permission from the publisher. Redistribution or other use that violates the Wrox Blox Terms of Service or otherwise violates the

U.S. copyright laws is strictly prohibited.

Creating a Microsite Manager with CodeIgniter®

What’s Model-View-Controller?

Model-View-Controller is a design pattern that allows developers to separate their code cleanly into

three categories:

❑

Models help you maintain data.

❑

Views display data from the model and user interface elements.

❑

Controllers handle user events that interact with models and views.

The important thing to remember is that MVC takes the user into account — it begins with them. It’s the

user who clicks a link, moves the mouse, or submits a form. It’s the controller that monitors this activity

and takes the appropriate action (such as manipulating the model and updating the view).

Because of MVC’s three-part separation, developers can create multiple views and controllers for any

given model without forcing changes in the model design. Similarly, multiple controllers can make use

of any model. This separation allows for easily maintained, portable, and organized applications.

For example, think about an MVC application that allows you to track eCommerce items in an online

store:

❑

You would have a model for product information.

❑

You would have multiple views to show single products, products in a list, products in search

results, and so on.

❑

You would have at least one controller that would organize those views into destinations, such

as index() (for home page), product_detail() , and search_results() .

Drilling down further, an MVC eCommerce application might involve the following flow of events:

1. The user visits the store’s home page.

. This simple event requires a controller action for the home page, which makes a quick call to the

model to retrieve the 10 most popular products based on recent sales.

. The model’s data is then transmitted to the view for the home page.

4. The view (including the data retrieved by the model) is what the user sees in the browser.

5. The user clicks on a link to see details on a particular product.

6. The underlying controller captures this user input (clicking the link), uses the model to retrieve

the product in question from the database, and then loads the appropriate view.

7. The cycle begins anew when the user takes another action, such as running a search or clicking

on a link.

Wrox Blox0 Creating a Microsite Manager with CodeIgniter By Myer - ISBN0 97804704133711 Prepared for CHRISTOPHER RINGWALD/

accordance with the WroxBlox Terms of Service. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without prior

written permission from the publisher. Redistribution or other use that violates the Wrox Blox Terms of Service or otherwise violates the

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