DX Auth
DX Auth is an authentication library for Code Igniter. It’s goal to enable you to easily include secure and easy to use authentication library to your project, while giving you the flexibility to choose from simple authentication system to full fledged authentication system.

Erkana
My goal with this library was to create a small set of methods and helpers that would prove useful for a variety of user authentication while not hijacking the framework and forcing you to adopt the practices that library dictates.

FreakAuth
Mammoth authorization system for CodeIgniter.

Simple Login Secure
Simplelogin is designed to give you a quick and simple login library that will get you up and running with an unobtrusive authorization system very quickly. It does not try to guess how you want to structure your app, it simply tries to give you a little help.

The Auth Library
The Auth Library is a small but powerful authentication library for CodeIgniter.

Auth library for CodeIgniter tutorial
For me personally I like this one the best. It is very simple and just enough to get started with out having tons of files to have to wade through.

What are your thoughts which one do you use and why?

Be sure and read my other CodeIgniter tips!

My basic setup is like this. First create the settings.php file. Second I open up the config/database.php and copy the values into my settings file. Third I open config/config.php and find any items that I think a user would want to change or should change. I never include things in the settings file that is dependent on my setup such as prefix, query strings, etc.

Once everything is in my settings file I alter the config/database.php and delete all the $db array values. Then I add:

$active_group = "default";
$active_record = TRUE;
include(APPPATH .'/settings.php');

Then for the config/config.php file I do basically the same thing. Delete everything I included in the settings.php file and then at the top add:

include(APPPATH .'/settings.php');

Because the database and config files use a different array it doesn’t clash by including this file in both places.

Be sure and read my other CodeIgniter tips!

First off lets take a look at the repair utility. By the user guide it is accessed like this:

if ($this->dbutil->repair_table('table_name'))
{
    echo 'Success!';
}

As you can see it is very simple and straight forward. You replace ‘table_name’ with yours and then it repairs it. This is great but most databases have a lot of tables and instead of writing out each table name you can use the nice list_tables function. Here is an example:

$tables = $this->db->list_tables();
foreach($tables as $table)
{
	if ($this->dbutil->repair_table($table))
	{
		$tb[]=$table;
	}
}
$data['repaired']=$tb;

The same code can be used for optimize as well just replace the repair_table with optimize_table.

Be sure and read my other CodeIgniter tips!

Step 1 is to create a My_controller.php file inside the libraries folder of application. Of course change “My” with your prefix setup in config.

Step 2. is to add this code to this file:

<?php if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
class core_Controller extends Controller
{
	function __construct()
	{
		parent::Controller();
		$this->setup();
	}

	// ------------------------------------------------------------------------

	/**
	* Setup the autoloaded items
	*/
	function setup()
	{
		if ($this->db->table_exists('sessions'))
		{
			$this->load->library('session');
			$this->load->library('auth');
			$this->load->helper('price');
			$this->load->helper('image');
			$this->load->helper('html');
		}
		else
		{
			redirect('setup');
		}
	}
}

The final step is in ALL your controllers besides the ones used in install is to extend this class. Example:

class Mycontroller extends core_Controller {

Now you can auto load anything you need and not have to rely on the default autoloader.

Be sure and read my other CodeIgniter tips!

Some people, most notably me, want to change where the view files are located in a CodeIgniter application. Here is a quick tip that I do, should you want to make the same change.

For my setup I like to have a template folder in the root to house my view files. So in order to get CodeIgniter to use this directory you have two options.

1. Is to edit system/libraries/Loader.php. Search for and change:

$this->_ci_view_path = 'templates/';

Please note that I assigned the root folder to the php include path.

2. Is a more preferred method and for it you make a copy Loader.php and make the same change above. But put the copy in your application/libraries/ folder. This is a better option because you are not altering any of the core files and upgrades will be easier later on.

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Screenshot of 269 tickets in support desk on my iPhone.

Include templates can be used for anything and I have seen them used for headers, footers, sidebars, etc. But what brings you lots of power is to use include templates inside loops, assigning them to variables, and adding variables to the includes.

Includes In Loops

Take for example the showlistings template file. The standard one has a foreach loop which handles displaying the listings in a table. It looks like this:

{foreach from=$results item="entry"}
{$entry.title}
{/foreach}

To convert this to an include you would do this:

{foreach from=$results item="entry"}
{include file="inc/inc_results.tpl" entry=$entry}
{/foreach}

Then in your inc/inc_results.tpl file add the part that would be looped over:

{$entry.title}
{$entry.price|format_money}

Of course this is very basic but if you have an advanced layout for your internal items then this is a life saver in simplifying it.

Assign Includes

Another wonderful feature is assigning an include file. This can be done like this:

{include file='inc/inc_sidebar.tpl' assign=navbar}

Then any where else in your template you need the side bar you would just add:

{$navbar}

This is really helpful if you have something that needs to be shared. For example at the top a list of links and then in the footer that same list.

Includes With Variables

The final section to this post is including a file with variables. For this lets pretend we are creating a header include. A common header needs a title, keywords, and description. So your include would look like this:

{include file="inc/inc_header.tpl" title="Your Title" keywords="key,word,here" description="Description Here"}

Then in your template:

Hopefully this post will show the great flexibility in the 68 Classifieds template system and give you ideas in making your templates easier to manage.

Before we get started you should download the source files so you can follow along.

If you are ready lets jump right in. The requirements of any module are pretty simple and it is a config.php which is used for the installation. Beyond that you can have a hooks.php file to enteract with the core, an index.php and admin.php which allows you to view them from the template, and finally an init.php file which handles installing, upgrading, and deleting.

Config File

The first thing I always do is build the config.php file. Inside this file it has:

<?php
$data['module']['name'] = "news";
$data['module']['displayname'] = 'News';
$data['module']['description'] = "Allows you to add news";
$data['module']['version'] = "v1.0";
$data['module']['admin_capable'] = "1";
$data['module']['user_capable'] = "1";

Each line basically tells the system something about your module.

Name – Is the module folder name.
Display Name – Is what is shown in the administration
Description – Is what is shown in the administration
Version – This the version number of the module
Admin Capable – This tells the system it has an admin file.
User Capable – This tells the system it can be accessed from your sites frontend.

Init File

The next step I did was create the init.php file so I could add a new table to the db.

This file as you can see includes three functions. install, upgrade, and uninstall. These are used for adding tables or altering existing ones. If you look at the install function I am just adding a new “posts” table to hold our news items. The upgrade is not used and the delete function drops the table.

News Class

Now we are going to create a news class file. This file will handle everything needed in the news system. Basically adding, updating, deleting, etc.. In the source download this is name “news_class.php”. I will not really go through all the code because it should be pretty straightforward. The only thing that is complex is the getNews method which uses a few internal classes to build the results. This also handles the sorting, searching, and displaying the items.

Admin

The admin.php file is used so the administrator can add/edit/delete news entries. The code at the top includes the necessary class files and also instantiates the news class.

require_once(FILESYSTEM_PATH .'includes/classes/kernel/Pagination.php');
require_once(FILESYSTEM_PATH .'includes/classes/wrapper/SuperglobalWrapper.php');
require_once(FILESYSTEM_PATH.'/modules/news/news_class.php');
$News=new News();

The pagination and wrapper files are the ones needed for paging so they must be included first. Then is the include for the news class. After that it is just a bunch of if else statements to determine what action is taking place.

Index

The index.php is very similar to the admin.php file with the exception it is only used on your sites frontend and will be responsible for showing your visitors the news.

The one difference is this code:

if(!defined('MAX_ROWS_SEARCH')) {
	define('MAX_ROWS_SEARCH', '5');
}

This the number of search results or items you want shown in the list.

Hooks

For our news module I created two hooks and you can see them in the hooks.php file. This file is used to interact with the core system and when a hook is called it will run the code in this file.

As you can see in the constructor I registered the two hooks.

function news_events(&$modules)
{
	$modules->register('admin_tpl_layout_settings', $this, 'add_link');
	$modules->register('index', $this, 'home_page');
}

In those register statements the first parameter is the hook name. The second is the class. And the third is the method in the class. So for the first one I am using the admin_tpl_layout_settings hook, the news_events class, and finally the add_link method inside this class.

That hook is very simple and all it does is display a link in your administration to manage your news. It will be shown under the settings tab.

The second hook is a custom one I created just for this module. I wanted to show the last three news items on the home page. What this does is query the database and add the results to an array which is assigned to the blog variable. With that you can edit your home.tpl template and add a foreach loop to show the latest three.

{foreach from=$blog item=entry}
<div class="newsbox">
	<h3>{$entry.post_title}</h3>
	<div class="entry">
		{$entry.post_content|truncate:150:"...":true}
		<p><a href="modules?mod=news&amp;ID={$entry.ID}">Continue Reading</a></p>
	</div>
</div>
{/foreach}

Templates

The templates folder of this module just contains the templates used in showing the news to a site visitor and for the administration. For the front end I named them “the_entry.tpl” and “the_posts.tpl”. The entry is a single item whereas the_posts is the list.

Wrap Up

In closing I hope this helps you better understand how to build a 68 Classifieds module and how everything all ties together. Also I know this module is very basic so for home work why not try to add more features to it?

But today just now all that changed. I found this great little bash script on Interspire’s Developer Network.

Here is the nice gem of code:

for i in $(svn diff --summarize -r 1403:1438 http://server/svn/project/trunk |
awk '{ print $2 }'); do p=$(echo $i | sed -e 's{http://server/svn/project/trunk/{{');
mkdir -p $(dirname $p); svn export $i $p; done

I know not very exciting to most folks but a real great find to me and probably my customers too.

PS: Be looking out for diff downloads in our next release.

The first one is PHP Smarty available from the TextMate SVN and Mike Zornek has instructions for installing it. This one has been a life safer for me when building custom templates or just altering existing ones.

The next one is a completely custom one I built. Although very basic it does a few important things. 1. It auto creates a module config file, 2. It auto creates the hooks file, and finally it auto creates the core layout template. Here is the link to the direct download for those interested.

» Download 68 Classifieds TextMate bundle.

With these two plugins installed TextMate is now my text editor of choice. It is small, simple, and very light weight yet still functions amazingly.