Just to give you a teaser of whats coming up

• Part 3 of my tutorial series
• How to reset forgotten Windows passwords
• Whats on my laptop – A new series where I discuss some of the must have software I use on a day to day basis

Once again, sorry for the lack of new content

Move along folks, nothing to see here, sorry!

In part 1, we installed the CodeIgniter framework, and after having explored the folder structure, we created a controller which displayed “Hello World!”.

Cleaning up the URL

If you remember, to access the hello controller, we had to visit http://localhost/index.php/hello, now this isn’t an ideal URL, you want something much cleaner, such as http://localhost/hello. This can be acheived using a simple rule, which is stored in a file called .htaccess. (Note: I’m assuming your running an apache web server, such as the XAMPP bundle I showed in part 1)

What the .htaccess file lets us do, it create a series of rules, and what happens when a rule is follwed. So first of all, you need to create a file called .htaccess in your web root (or in the directory where you have index.php). The period in front of htaccess means its a hidden file, so you may need to show hidden files to see it.

Paste this into the file, and save it, i’ll explain what each line does in a moment.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

The first line is turning the Rewrite engine on which lets us set rules for the URL.

The second line sets the condition which we’re trying to match, what it does if, find any requests which arn’t for index.php (you have to escape the period, as a period is a wildcard). Later on, you will need to expand upon the condition, to include directories for images, css, javascript etc, and robots.txt, but that has been ommitted for the time being for simplicity.

The third line is what will happen when it encounters a request for something which matches the rule, in this case, anything which doesn’t have index.php in the URL. What it then does it put index.php before the class name for us, so that the index.php page can get the controller.

Update

Based on some feedback from the CodeIgniter forums (post here), it appears that the above .htaccess may not work for everyone (especially if you have the root of this tutorial in a sub folder of the web root) and the following was propsed as a full proof, works on all apache servers.

The main differance here is that the rewrite rule is relative to your current directory, so you don’t need the application in your web root, useful if your working on multiple porjects.

Also, it sets rules so that requests for images, css, javascript etc arn’t routed to the index page.

Trying it out

So if you now visit http://localhost/hello, you should now see the same page as when you visit
http://localhost/index.php/hello.

One more thing we have to do, which isn’t causeing a problem now, is make a change in the config file, found in /config/config.php. We need to change what out index page is to blank, so that links and forwarding work later on.

In this series, I aim to give you an overview of how Code Igniter works, how it can give you nice clean URLs, how to use the MVC in your applications and how to interact with databases from within Code Igniter.

We will be building a simple application for managing todo lists, where the items are arranged in lists, and can be assigned to categories. I may even further extend this tutorial to add more functionality, and show how to create your own libraries which you can reuse in your own applications.

Installing Code Igniter

This is the first in my tutorial series, and we will discuss the very basics of setting up the Code Igniter environment, checking that all works, and creating a basic Hello World page.

First of all, you need to have a local web development environment. I’m using the XAMPP for linux package, as it provides an all in one solution, including apache, mySQL, phpmyadmin and a range of other stuff you don’t need to worry about. If you don’t have XAMPP, download it now (available for Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris). Once you’ve installed that, you’ll need to download the latest version of the Code Igniter framework, which is is version 1.6.2 at the time of writting.

Once you’ve got XAMPP up and running (if you have any problems, consult the XAMPP documentation, trouble shooting XAMPP is beyond this tutorial), unzip the Code Igniter file you just downloaded into the web root (htdocs in the directory you created XAMPP).

Now if you go to http://localhost/CodeIgniter_1.6.2/, or whatever version you installed, you should see the default Code Igniter welcome page. If you don’t, you most probably didn’t start the XAMPP server correctly.

Understanding the file structure, and moving things around

Now if you look inside the Code Igniter folder, you should see index.php, license.txt, system and user_guidhttp://localhost/index.php/helloe. Now this default file structure works fine, but i prefer some seperation. This is entirely optional, but for the rest of the tutorial, I will assume you have your structure as follows.

In the system folder, you’ll find an application folder, this is the blood and guts of our applications, and is where almost all the code you write will go. Everything else in the system folder is the framework itself, so you don’t need to worry about it. Move the contents of the application folder up a level, so its in the same directory as index.php. It is also recommended that you move the framework itself out of the web root as you won’t need to access it directly. I recommend moving it to be above htdocs, and rename it to Code_Igniter_1.6.2, this way, you can have several versions of the framework installed, and switch between them easily. Finally, move everything index.php and todo into the web root. At this point you may delete the CodeIgniter_1.6.2 folder in the web root (which has got the user_guide and license.txt, both of which are online). You should now have just index.php and the contents of the application directory in the web root, with the framework one level above.

Now if you go to http://localhost/, you should get an error. This is because we’ve rearranged the file structure, and not told it where to find everything. To fix this, we need to edit index.php, so open it up in your favourite text editor. On line 26 (or there abouts) you should see it declare the location of the system folder, $system_folder = “system”;

Change this to point to your code igniter installation, which is now ‘../Code_Igniter_i.6.2′, and change the application path to be a period (current directory). If you now refresh your browser, you should once again see the welcome page.

So whats in each directory?

Config – This is where you do all the boring site configuration, such as setting up a database connection, site wide configuration and URL handling amongst other things.

Controllers – This is where you write your program logic, with a file for each class, made up of functions, more on this later.

Errors – Just defines what the various error pages are like, such as 404 errors etc.

Helpers – These are site wide collections of functions which you can write yourself, you won’t need to do much here.

Hooks – Not important at this stage, might talk about them at a later stage.

Language – Not important unless you plan on dealing in more then one language.

Libraries – Groups of related functions, which you can use i your controllers.

Models – Used to represent objects, do all the interaction with the database.

Views – This is where all the lovely HTML goes that the end user sees.

Hello world

So lets finally get down to it then.

Create a new controller called hello.php in the controller directory, snd enter the following code into it.

<?php
  class Hello extends Controller{
    function index(){
      echo "Hello World!";
    }
  }
?>


 

Seeing is believing

So now, go have a look at what you just done… go on, I’ll wait.

Now matter how many time you refresh, you still get the welcome message, this is because we need to explicitly tell Code Igniter where to find the page we’re looking for, or explicitly tell it in a configuration file. So lets tell it where to find our new Hello controller. Point your browser to http://localhost/index.php/hello, and you should see a message saying Hello World!

In the next installment, I’ll show you how to set the default page to be your Hello world message instead of the welcome screen, and how to get rid of the need for index.php/… in the URL, and how to use views for output.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial, and found it useful, if you have any comments or came across any problems, let me know in the comments.

If you liked this, and would like to be notified of future posts and tutorials, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

Part 2 is now online

If the above idea doesn’t appeal to you, and I very much doubt it does, then there is a way to protect yourself. AntiPhormLite (Windows only) will run as a background process generating random traffic, based on some preferences you specify. All of this random ‘browsing’ will merge with your real browsing, making the data the ISP’s have about you useless.

Unfortunatly,I wasn’t able to test this, due to it being Windows only, but they claim its lightweight (only downloads the HTML needed to simulate browsing behaviour, nothing bandwidth intensive such as media file), and indistinguishable from real browsing.

Anyone tried this, does it work as well as they claim? Let me know in the comments

via BoingBoing

Code Money, by Jonathan Coulton

Enjoy!

EDIT: As soon as I published the post, the server seems to have stopped responding, so, to avoid disappointment, theres the youtube version

So I decided to download the alpha today, and installed it on my linux system, installation was a breeze, just untar it, and run the executable in the thunderbird directory. For the entire duration of exploring it, it was very responsive, and no crashes either.

Coming through a pure Gmail background for the last year or so (I have it collect mail on several accounts) using a desktop email client was surprisingly familiar. Largely to do with the fact I’ve used Thunderbird in the past.

When you first run Thunderbird, you prompted to create an account, so I went ahead, and selected Gmail, entered my email and password, and I was set. It then started to download all my emails for me, but it stopped after approximately 300 messages… I’m not sure if this is intentional behaviour, or a simple bug, but after having manually requested it to download my mail, I had it all sitting in my inbox. The 300 messages at a time shouldn’t be an issue for all but the most hardcore emailers, who receive hundreds or even thousands of messages each day.

One of the main anticipated features, is the tabbed interface, you can open messages in tabs, as well as in a new window. Unfortunately, at this time, the only way to do this, is right click, and open in a new tab. Hopefully in the final release, this will have either a shortcut associated to it, or the middle mouse click action, as in firefox. Also, the new tab steals focus, which I find rather annoying, do you?

As with any good email client, there’s built in spam filtering, custom filters (which are on par with gmails filters), support for multiple accounts, marking emails (starring), tagging etc. There’s also a very responsive search as you type, which is very accurate, although at this moment in time, it doesn’t seem to support operations such as from:xyz.

You can also use Thunderbird for your RSS, but this seems to be very slow, as it only retrieves each post as you select it, and there doesn’t appear any way to view all posts from a

ll your feeds.

So any of you tried the new Thunderbird yet, what are your thoughts, what do you love, hate, think needs to go, or think is missing?

This is a limited time offer, so hurry up!

I’ve been using Code Igniter for several 2 or 3 months now, and find it very easy and natural to use. If you’ve done PHP programming before, it will all be very familiar to you, and if there’s something you don’t know or understand, there’s a very comprehensive user documentation, a friendly forum, and a wiki with user contributions such as new libraries.

Over the coming weeks, I will have a series of tutorials for Code Igniter, showing how to install and set it up, and how to build a complete web application in it.

If you have anything you feel should be included in the tutorial series, then post it in the comments (although I make no guarantee to cover everything), and if its a big topic, it may even deserve its own tutorial series.

The first part of the tutorial is now online!

The first part of the tutorial is now available here, it covers setting up the framework, explains the structure of a Code Igniter web app, and shows you how to make a page say “Hello world”

After considering starting a blog for many a year, I’ve finally got round to it, now lets all hope my enthusiasm doesn’t fade =)