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Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

It’s still awesome, but so many blogging options and I suck at sticking to 1 thing.

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

CodeIgniter has been my choice of PHP framework over the last year. It’s actually really the first one I’ve ever used and because of it’s simplicity, excellent documentation and easy to add classes, it made an excellent framework to get up and running.

One of the early and helpful techniques you want to pick up is extending the base controller. By default, your own controllers extend CodeIgniters Controller class. This might be fine for small sites, but if your site even a little complex there is no doubt that you will want to have every page do some initial routines to maybe process an existing user, check the state of sessions and so forth.

It would be a lot of work to have to maintain something like this on every controller file you created, plus adding in new controllers would likely be error prone. With the following setup, you have a preset way your application loads.

The solution is the extend the base Controller. It’s a simple process, but every time I do this, I always forget a step or miss something small that takes me some time to remember why something was not working. So here is how you do it.

CodeIgniter has a default subclass prefix setting which you must adhere to when you extend any class in CI. By default the prefix is ‘MY_’. You can modify this in application/config/config.php. This setting requires you to name your class starting with whatever setting you use here.

If I wanted to have my classes prefixed with RT_, I would make that the setting there. Now I would name all my classes like: RT_Controller or RT_Sessions if I wanted to extend the sessions class.

The next step is creating the subclass. Your controller subclass belongs in application/libraries. This class will extend the base Controller and be named based on your prefix you configured above.

class RT_Controller extends Controller {

   public function RT_Controller() {

     parent::Controller();

  }

}

The above class is now set to be your base controller. For any controller you create, you would place them into /application/controllers and extend your base controller.

class Home extends RT_Controller {

 public function Home() {

  parent::RT_Controller();

 }

}

Notice her we are calling the parent RT_Controller, and not Controller.

Troubleshooting

If you are getting an error such as “cannot find RT_Controller in Home…”, chances are your file is named using all lower case. On Linux systems, files are case sensitive, and files are named the same as the class being instanced so you would need to rename your file RT_Controller.php.

Another issue might be the location of your main controller. It needs to be in your application/libraries directory because the of the way CI loads, it will check here for any files with your prefix first, otherwise the standard CI controller will load.

Here’s the clip:

Green Lanter (2011)

Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a human who is chosen to become part of The Green Lantern Corps. This comic adaption from DC Comics looks promising enough, as long as they don’t overuse too many corny humor with one-liners it just may be ok. Ryan Reynolds looks like a good pick for this role.

Cowboys and Aliens (2011)

Another Jom Favereu comic book adaption comes to town, this time on a horse. Daniel Craig plays a escaped convict with an odd pair of cuffs. Set in the period of cowboys, a small town in the west is attacked by aliens. This movie looks pretty cool, but I hesitate only because I think Jon’s vision of Iron Man was a little corny and simple minded. While I’ve never read Coboys and Aliens, the trailer looks very good.

Little Red Riding Hood (2011)

Let’s see, everyone knows this fable of a little girl in a red cape and hood sashes through the forest to her grandmothers house only be find a wolf where she ones was. Well did you Little Red has a back story? Apparently she’s had it coming to her all along. Warner Bros. writes a movie length version of the classic fable that looks like Twilight meets UnderWorld. I’m not sure if they are simply trying to move the vampire lovers to werewolf movies or did someone really think this movie needed to be done? I like the graphics in the trailer though and Amanda Seyfried is pretty sexy.

Source Code

Jake Gyllenhall is back in a futuristic thriller where he is put into someone else’s body for the last few minutes of that persons life in an attempt to learn about how they died. Sounds cool. Except its just on a train that exploded, and they want to know who did it. Meanwhile he does it so many times he falls in love and has to save her. I think I know how this one can play out. Looks promising and is probably good, but I don’t know, the trailer seems to give away the whole thing. I’ll likely skip this one.

The Green Hornet (2011)

Hmmm, this movie has been in the works for a while, and the last trailer I saw (which was a while back now) had Seth Rogan as Set Rogan who plays The Green Hornet. Well a new trailer has been released and well… When a trailer has a lot of slow motion, explosions and is edited like a music video I tend to think it’s full of crap. So I’ll do a wait an see on this one.

The challenge brought to me was making the site a more compelling place to shop and learn about why the Coobie Bra is so comfortable. The original site was quite bland, and the shopping experience leaved much to desire. The site was also built with individual HTML files making updates a chore.

I built the new site with Textpattern, a brilliant and easy to use CMS. The template was custom designed for the site, so all the coding was by hand as well. I chose FoxyCart as my shopping cart, so designing the shop pages were easy and integrated perfectly into the rest of the site.

I added lots of interactivity to the site to give it a modern feel. A drop down form for users who want to get on the mailing list and custom image gallery that changes when the user hovers over each image. I’ve also implemented some social networks and sharing options to get the word about the Coobie Bra. I also wrote a custom script to fetch YouTube videos featuring coobie bras, but are currently turned off.

The site will extend into other products and areas, and has helped tremendously with sales, and wholesale contacts.

The original duo performs live on Jimmy Fallon.