Codeigniter3-Improved

A codeigniter 3 improvement attempt before codeigniter 4 is officially released. It adds various libraries and classes from different sources.

Installation

If you do not already have it installed visit: https://getcomposer.org/ to download and install.

Switch to the codeigniter3-improved directory from your terminal or cmd prompt and run

composer install

Composer will pull in all the required files to get you up and running.

See resources below to setup Migrations.

Improvements

These improvements do not stop you from sticking to the original Codeigniter methods. i.e. you could still use CI's original routing, views, models and migration.

1. Better routing class

Your routes.php will now look like this:

$route['default_controller'] = 'welcome';
$route['404_override'] = '';
$route['translate_uri_dashes'] = FALSE;

Route::any('account', 'welcome/account');
Route::post('login' 'welcome/login');

$route = Route::map($route);

See resources to learn more

2. ORM based on Laravel's Eloquent.

You can now create using Eloquent. For example a model: application/models/post.php will look like this

<?php defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

use \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model as Eloquent;

class Post extends Eloquent
{
	protected $table = 'posts';
}

and can be used like this in

<?php
...

$this->load->database();
$this->load->model('post');

// display post with id '1'
print_r(Post::find(1));

// insert a post

$post = new Post;

$post->title = 'post title';

$post->save();

//update a post
$post = Post::find(1);

$post->title = 'New post title';

$post->save();

// delete a post
$post = Post::find(1);

$post->delete();

See resources to learn more

3. Twig templating engine for easier layout, creation of themes and templates.

Twiggy follows a specific theme-layout-template structure that helps separates your logic from your views. You can create multiple themes and layouts and switch themes and layout on the fly!

Create a directory structure:

+-application/
| +-themes/
| | +-default/
| | | +-layouts/

Create a default layout index.html.twig and place it in layouts folder:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<meta charset="utf-8">
		<!--[if lt IE 9]>
		<script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
		<![endif]-->
		<title>Default layout</title>
	</head>
    <body>
        {% block content %}

        {% endblock %}
	</body>
</html>

Create a default template file index.html.twig at the root of default theme folder:

{% extends _layout %}

{% block content %}

	Default template file.

{% endblock %}

You should end up with a structure like this:

+-application/
| +-themes/
| | +-default/
| | | +-layouts/
| | | | +-index.html.twig
| | | +-index.html.twig

Use twiggy in controllers

<?php
defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Welcome extends CI_Controller {

	public function __construct()
	{
		parent::__construct();
	}

	public function index()
	{
		$this->load->library('twiggy');
		$this->twiggy->layout('index');
		$this->twiggy->template('index');
		$this->twiggy->display();
	}

	public function account()
	{
		$this->twiggy->layout('blog');
		$this->twiggy->template('account');
		$this->twiggy->display();
	}
}

4. Better migrations

See resources to configure and use.

5. Dotenv file for sensitive configurations

You can save sensitive information in .env file. Just rename the .env.example file to begin. It contains environment configuration and database configuration

APP_ENV="development"
APP_KEY=base64:CtXClYBzi7NhBuACUHVX3qt2z19lB6mmrUmI+Vj8EE0=

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_DATABASE=ci
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=

You can also add other values and use them like this

$sitename = env('MY_SITE_NAME');

// or with a default value specified if empty.
$sitename = env('MY_SITE_NAME', 'Codeigniter');

Resources

Routing: http://cibonfire.com/docs/developer/routes
Templating:
- Twig: http://twig.sensiolabs.org/doc/tags/extends.html
- Twiggy library: http://edmundask.github.io/codeigniter-twiggy/
Database: https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/eloquent
Migrations: http://docs.phinx.org/en/latest/migrations.html
.ENV: https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv

Contributing

Thank you for considering contributing to this project! There's room for a lot more improvements, I only ask that you stick to Codeigniter's model of keeping things a simple as possible. That's the major reason I have omitted using DI containers here.

Shotman/Codeigniter3-Improved