jigniter™

There were news recently from Ellislab and one of the most important changes was the migration of CodeIgniter source code from BitBucket to GitHub.

• All the source code was moved to GitHub.
• CodeIgniter 2.0.3 was released.
• “Core” is no longer being publicly maintained and CodeIgniter “Reactor” is now known simply as CodeIgniter. This is aimed to simplify CodeIgniter development.
• The issue tracker was also migrated to GitHub and now it is officially hosted there.

For sure this should not have been a trivial decision but we are sure that EllisLab will handle all this successfully and this decision is something that we all agree.

Usually developers need to combine CMS solutions with the applications they are developing. There are multiple ways to accomplish this however if you want to learn how to create a CMS with CodeIgniter, we can find dozens of tutorials that helps us creating a Content Management System from scratch.

PyroCMS is maybe one of the most popular CMS based on CodeIgniter. It is modular, open source and based on CodeIgniter framework. You can download it and try to understand how it works by digging into the code, or you can even go a step ahead and try to develop your own CMS to accomplish your requirements, however in some cases it could be convenient and easier to use an existing solution unless you explicitly need to create it from scratch.

There are many reasons why you should take care of your URL patterns and domain name rules in your applications. One of these reasons is about SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

In CodeIgniter applications we can easily use htaccess rules to prepare our applications in CodeIgniter for SEO. One of these changes involve to redirect all the traffic coming to www to non-www domain, or viceversa.

You can remove www from URL easily by changing your htaccess file and adding some basic rules. Also, there is a SEO Redirect tool that you can use to verify the redirect is SEO friendly.

CodeIgniter 2.0 introduced a new error page feature that you can take advantage of. You can use a custom 404 error controller in CodeIgniter 2.0 to handle error requests.

In order to use this feature you need to edit the routes.php under config directory.

$route['404_override']  = 'error/error_404';

Then you may create a new controller named Error with at least that function error_404() inside. To see a working example you can refer to this article.

The pagination library in CodeIgniter is flexible enough to prepare it with your custom CSS rules. However, the default usage of this library do not include any CSS rule previously defined so we can digg the Internet to search for CSS to be used in CodeIgniter Pagination.

Mis Algoritmos collected a nice gallery of CSS styles for Pagination that you can easily use in your CodeIgniter applications. Here are the styles.