CodeIgniter Tutorial

What is CodeIgniter?

CodeIgniter is a PHP Framework and is lightweight compared to other framework. Its purpose is to help you code faster and teach you how to apply MVC (Model–View–Controller) architecture to separate code from design.

What are the advantages of CodeIgniter?

I can’t tell you all the advantages of using CodeIgniter but the following are most common features of using a framework.

• Speed up development
• Easy to learn than standard PHP
• Use existing code rather than starting from scratch
• Well documented
• Prevent XSS or CSRF exploit
• Prevent SQL Injection
• Separate code from design
• Built in shopping cart, etc.
• Support multiple databases (MySQL, postgre, odbc, mssql, sqlite, oci8)
• Form validation
• Handle session securely

CodeIgniter is small, fast, and simple PHP framework compare to other competitor. Because it is well documented, the majority of PHP programmers prefer CodeIgniter.

Self-Experience

After coding online hotel reservation, I realize that my code (Standard PHP) is not ready for known vulnerabilities like SQL injection. With this in mind, I tried to modify the code from MySQL to MySQLi. But still I was not convinced because there’s a lot of issue that I need to consider and converting it would require another time. But after deciding of using CodeIgniter, I was able to finish the coding from scratch (functionalities of online hotel reservation) within 2 weeks.

By studying a framework, all you need is to understand on how MVC works. And besides, working with MVC is much easier than standard PHP. One example is using the redirect function. Since CodeIgniter is using and MVC framework, it’s easy to redirect one page to another page.

In this Book, I will teach you all the techniques of using CodeIgniter. So stay tuned while I prepare a tutorial for this.