DevShed has posted the fifth part of their series looking at CodeIgniter and its use to make a simple blogging application. The focus this time is on the output, working with the views to "pretty up" the resulting pages.

Although in its current state, the blogger works well, its visual presentation looks pretty primitive. Therefore, in this fifth part of the series I'll be adding some CSS styles to the view files that comprise this blog application to improve its look and feel.

They start with a review of the code so far - a simple blogging app with the ability to let users comment on each entry. The HTML and CSS you'll need to add to the views to make the output look more like this.

DevShed continues their series on using CodeIgniter to make a simple blogging application with this new article. It focuses on the next step in the blog's evolution - making it able to accept user comments.

A decent blog application, however, must provide users with a mechanism that lets them post their comments easily, and the simplest way to do this is via an HTML form. Therefore, in the next few lines, I'll be explaining how to modify the controller class and the comments view file created in the preceding article to incorporate a basic web form that permits users to post comments on a particular blog entry.

They start by reviewing the code and application so far, ensuring we're all on the same page. From there, they add code into the controller to handle the form input and make a view to create the form itself.

DevShed continues their series creating a simple blogging application with the CodeIgniter framework with this part of the series - adding in a display for user comments.

In this specific case, the first of these files was defined as a basic controller, and was provided with the ability to paginate the aforementioned blog entries via the corresponding pagination class included with CodeIgniter. However, in its current incarnation, the blog application is pretty limited. It doesn't let users post comments on each blog entry. Thus, in the next few lines I'll be improving the signature of the controller class to address this important issue.

The review the code from before (showing the pagination of the blog entries) and add onto it a new comments method and how to create a new view to show the messages visitors to the site have submitted.

Since the Zend Framework is mostly a library of components behind a framework structure, its parts can also be used individually if need be. In this new post Matt Stone shows how to combine the Zend_Acl component (for access control) with a CodeIgniter framework application.

In this post I will explain how to build simple access control functionality for your Code Igniter application using the Zend Framework ACL library. To follow this tutorial you will need a working installation of Code Igniter and a database. You will also need to download the Zend Framework.

He goes through the whole process - code and all - for pulling in and using the Zend_Acl library complete with a database (schema and inserts provided) as well as a sample controller for CodeIgniter to test things out.

Douglas Brown is running a poll in a new post to his blog asking which of the six choices (of the major PHP frameworks) is your favorite PHP framework.

In a perfect world, I would suggest to learn them all! However, there are only 24 hours in a day, and prioritizing your PHP framework education might be a good idea. So above I added a poll that I plead to other PHP developers out there to vote on. Hopefully after a lot of participation we will see the most popular PHP framework.

His motivation is to provide a good resource to developers looking to choose a framework and wanting to find one of the best supported and most used choices. He also solicits comments on the post if you have opinions on why one framework shines above the rest.

DevShed continues their series covering the CodeIgniter framework in this second part, a look at paginating the results of a database query for blog entries.

In this initial stage, the controller in question had a rather limited functionality, since it was only capable of displaying a bunch of blog entries that were previously stored in a MySQL table. [...] Nevertheless, in this second article of the series, I'll be explaining how provide the controller class built in the preceding tutorial with the capability for paginating blog entries.

Basing the enhancements on the code from the previous article, they update their controller to use the pagination library that comes with the framework to split up the results. The page number is based off of the third parameter of the URL.

DevShed starts off a new series today looking at making a blogging engine with the CodeIgniter framework. In this first part they get things set up and start work on the MySQL tables and views.

People love to communicate, which may be why one of the most popular web applications you can develop is a blogger. In this six-part series, you'll learn how to develop a blogging application using PHP and the Code Igniter framework. In this first article, we'll create the bare bones structure, with plenty of code samples to help you understand the process.

You'll already need a local copy of the CodeIgniter framework installed before you get going (download here). With that set up, you can follow along with their simple controller creation and making the view to pull out blog posts from their example MySQL database.

On the AskAboutPHP.com blog eldee takes a look at helpers, plugins and libraries in the CodeIgniter PHP framework including some examples.

With so many published PHP classes and functions, it would be a shame if we couldn't use them in CI. Fortunately CI (like all good frameworks) provides not one but three ways to integrate 3rd code, by using Helpers, Plugins and Libraries. [...] As I found out during the course of my CI project, Helpers, Plugins and Libraries are nothing more than glorified includes. I can pretty much take any 3rd party code and integrate into my application using any of the 3 methods.

His example uses the Google Graph class as each type (helper, library and plugin) with some example code.

Douglas Clifton has taken some time to look at a group of the web application frameworks out there (not just PHP - Pearl, Python and Ruby too) and offer up some opinions on them. This new post is the result.

It just wouldn't be fair after my last post to ignore the tried-and-true server-side Web application frameworks. I am certainly familiar with all of them, though I haven't necessarily used every one in a production environment.

The among the PHP frameworks mentioned are: Drupal, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony. His personal choice was CodeIgniter:

It's light weight, fast, and stays out of your way. There are any number of class modules to choose from, and you can discard what you don't need to lighten the load even more.

The AskAboutPHP.com blog has posted a helpful new tutorial for those using CodeIgniter out there - how to extend the native Model class to bend it to your will.

I'm in the process of creating models for my CI project, and realized that certain functions within the models were getting repetitive. Using CI's ability to create my own custom libraries, I was able to create my own custom 'Model' which extends from the core 'Model' object. How this simple architecture has cleaned up my code is simply remarkable.

Rather than overwriting the main Model.php file with some of your own changes, he suggests creating a new library, a "parent model" that can be extended instead to provide some common functions that all of your application's models might need. For something a bit more complex, he also points to this library that extends the models to give it CakePHP-like functionality.