What this book covers

Chapter 1: Introduction to CodeIgniter, will introduce you to what frameworks are, and specifically we will talk about CI and how it can help in our day to day work. We will see what CI offers and what it doesn't.

Chapter 2: Setting up a CodeIgniter Site, will help you to prepare the basic configuration of your site, studying CI's structure and config files. At the end you will have a working CI installation.

Chapter 3: Navigating Your Site, will cover some important topics, like the MVC pattern and how CI handles this pattern, and we will make an example controller just to see how all this works.

Chapter 4: Using CI to Simplify Databases, helps you to start working with databases. This is a very important topic. CI will really help us at this point, so we are going to see in detail all the tools at our disposal, including Active Record.

Chapter 5: Simplifying HTML Pages and Forms, will help you with HTML and form helpers, which are some important tools you will find in CodeIgniter; we will see some examples about their usage and introduce form validation.

Chapter 6: Simplifying Sessions and Security, will cover some important security features of CI, which will help make your site more secure. As we will also talk about sessions we will build a simple login feature.

Chapter 7: CodeIgniter and Objects, introduces a bit on object-oriented programming and how CI makes use of it, including the use of the CI super object, and how we can modify and use it.

Chapter 8: Improving Our Application with Third-Party Code, will help you take some rest from the hard work you have done in the previous chapters. We will see some third-party code that we can easily add to our site, improving it, and adding interesting functionalities.

Chapter 9: Using CI to Communicate, explains how CI helps us in communication. Communication is an important part of every site. We will see the ftp class, email class, and XML-RPC class and, of course, the possibility to add more as we need!

Chapter 10: How CI Helps to Provide Dynamic Information, will show some more useful helpers and classes, this will include the date helper, text helper, and table and language classes. All of this will help in the development of our site, not only in reducing code, but in adding powerful features to our working toolbox.

Chapter 11: Using CI to Handle Files and Images, will be about files, uploading, downloading, and compressing them, of course, all with CI classes! As always those classes will make our life easier. Image treatment also has some space in the chapter as CI has some nice features to crop, reduce, watermark, and so on.

Chapter 12: Moving Your Site to the WWW, will finally show you how to upload your site to a shared host or similar. Here we will see in detail how to do that, and also what kind of error we can expect to encounter.

Chapter 13: CRUD—or Putting It All Together, will be a chapter of "putting it all together", where we'll take time to recap and emphasize the most important topics covered to the moment. Insert, edit, and remove records from the database are some topics we will see here, but also ordering and pagination of results.

Chapter 14: The Verdict on CI, will summarize the key points of CI, not to forget anything, as every little thing CI offers will be of great help.

Chapter 15: Resources and Extensions, will give a list of resources and third-party code—we don't want to reinvent the wheel! We will take a look at some useful extensions such as authentication, PDF generation, invoicing, and much more.

The Appendix will introduce a new and interesting CI feature, the cart class; building a store has never been easier!