Views are a key ingredient in any MVC application, and CodeIgniter applications aren't any different. Today, we're going to learn what a view is, and discover how they can be used to create a templating solution for your CodeIgniter projects. The first part of this tutorial will educate complete beginners to CodeIgniter on what a view is, and how to use them in a typical application. The second half will discuss the motivations for finding a templating solution, and guide the reader through the necessary steps for creating a simple, yet effective templating library.

They introduce you to some of the fundamentals behind views, templating, using multiple views and using the templating to push values out to the site.

Symfony 1.2 - 1.4 expects all partials to follow this convention: templates/_partial.php. What happens when you need to organize your partials in subfolder? I tried a number of "Symfunky" avenues.

She tried a few ways - calling the helper with the include_partial method but it didn't resolve to the path she wanted. Next she tried a different path, but Symfony only interpreted it differently - and not the way she wanted. After a few more tries, she found a solution - using get_partial with a parameter that defined the subfolder to look in.

As you continue writing for WordPress more and more, the level of difficulty and complexity of your plugins will eventually reach far beyond the simple back-end data manipulation, as demonstrated in our beginner's article. In this installment we'll cover in-depth: database interaction, Admin Widgets, and Sidebar Widgets. Today's example will be a custom built "Most Popular by Views" plugin, which creates an admin area widget for us to view, and a sidebar widget for visitors to see.

Besides waling through the whole process, the tutorial offers a download of the source if you want to get started right away. The resulting plugin can be used on both the admin and public sides of the site as a widget that can be dropped in easily. Code to create both the widget and the database table it needs for a backend are included.

In this third chapter of the series I'm going to discuss one that bases its functionality on the loader class that comes bundled with CI. [...] By means of this method, it is very simple to replace in one single step all the variables included into multiple views with actual data. Therefore, in the next few lines I'm going to discuss how to use it to generate a dynamic web document, which will display some database contents.

After a quick review of loading views sequentially, they look at the new stuff - a "master view" that can load multiple other views inside. To pass information into this master view, they use the "$this->load->vars()" method included in the framework.

Now it's time to continue exploring the capabilities given by CodeIgniter when it comes to handling views. Since the visual appearance of the web page mentioned above was pretty rudimentary, in this second article I'm going to improve it a bit to make it look more appealing and professional.

To add in their CSS, they update their header_view.php file to includes the styles in the template. The views for each block are then loaded via the controller - header, content and footer areas.

And, of course, PHPDeveloper.org never shares any information it gets from its users with outside sources, so you can rest assured that your email address will not be shared or sold off to anyone.

So, if you'd like to recieve email summaries of all of the great news, views, and community happenings that you see here each week delivered right to your email, head over and signup now!]]> Mon, 23 Jan 2006 08:56:18 -0600