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This week I began building a site for V using PHP and MySQL technology. I’ll admit when it comes to PHP I am a complete noob but I was determined to write this site from scratch and by the end of it hopefully be a pro! But here is how it really played out…

I would say I got as far as parsing the header, body and footer dynamically into an index.php file before my brain seized up. I was stuck and so I decided to send out a cry for help on the internets. Lucky for me Fernando Ferraz, who fortunately just added me to FB after disappearing from the face of the earth for years and then comes back a competent programer,  answered the call.  His suggestion was, “Why the f*** are you starting from scratch you noob, use CodeIgniter.” He than began to explain to me that CodeIgniter (CI) is an open source PHP application framework that uses MVC (model view controller) architecture that I can install and use to build my site.

Ok cool but whats that?

In a nutshell it pretty much gives you all the scripts you need to start a secure, flexible, and easy to manage dynamic site and all you have to do is change a bit of text in a few config files. However, as easy as that sounds only after playing with CI and pulling my teeth out for 7 hours is really when I began to grasp the application and start to love it.

So why is CI so great, well its because of the MVC architecture I mentioned earlier.  MVC uses ‘controllers’ which are simply .php files that you can refer to in your code that will parse all your pages for you, as opposed to using the include function to parse different files, noob.  In other words imagine writing different modules of code that will contain different classes and functions that will be combined for you as you need them.  This is likely poor terminology but I’m calling it object oriented scripting!

I recommend to everyone if you ever decide to learn PHP definitely check out CI. And thank you to Hutch[S] and bwoodall at irc.freenode.net/codeigniter for answering all my silly questions!

Now to figure out how to create XML from the tables!…sigh.

Adrian.