Site Configuration: CodeIgniter
From Wikipedia of the Dark Jedi Brotherhood, an online Star Wars Club
The Dark Jedi Brotherhood leverages CodeIgniter (CI) as its PHP MVC framework. Because the DJB site is far from simple, the specifics of the CodeIgniter implementation is detailed below.
If you are a developer for the Dark Jedi Brotherhood or you have aspirations to be one, learning all about CI is required. You can find documentation here. I highly recommend Jeffrey Way's video tutorials.
Contents
Structure
The Brotherhood's site uses the standard CI application structure:
| Directory | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| application | Base application folder | |
| - cache | Contains cached files (This is currently not used by the DJB) | |
| - config | CodeIgniter and Custom configuration settings for the DJB site | |
| - controllers | The files found in here control what models to instatiate, what business logic to execute, and what templates to render | |
| - core | Files in here are auto-loaded and override/extend core classes found in /system/core | |
| - errors | Holds error pages. (This is currently not used by the DJB) | |
| - helpers | Files in here (always appended by _helper.php) contain functions and classes that are made available at a global level in the application | |
| - hooks | Files in here allow for code insertion in core Code Igniter. (This is currently not used by the DJB) | |
| - language | Alternate language files. (This is currently not used by the DJB) | |
| - libraries | The files in here contain classes that extend or enhance the CodeIgniter framework for the DJB | |
| - logs | Logs! | |
| - models | The files in here contain the core business logic of the DJB. The classes represent site objects (e.g. Members, Prestige, Units, Credits, Possessions, etc) | |
| - third_party | The files and directories in here are from external locations (e.g. Smarty, dBug, etc) | |
| - views | These are the DJB's template files | |
| css | Stylesheets | |
| js | JavaScript libraries | |
| images | Images. Enough said. | |
Smarty Parser
Rather than mixing pure PHP with HTML, the DJB leverages the Smarty Templating Engine (version 2). Smarty does not work cleanly with CodeIgniter out of the box, so the following files have been added to support the templating engine:
| File | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| config/smarty.php | Configuration settings for Smarty | |
| third_party/smarty/ | Smarty v2 code | |
| libraries/Smarty.php | Base class to initialize smarty | |
| libraries/Tpl.php | Extends the class defined in libraries/Smarty.php and adds a boatload of custom DJB features | |
| libraries/DJB_Parser.php | Extends the CodeIgniter Parser object to leverage Smarty AND a template wrapper that is custom to the DJB | |
Config
I'm not going to list all of the configuration files...just ones that we've tweaked/added.
| File | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| autoload.php | Specifies which helpers, libraries, models, config, etc files to load automatically. | |
| cache.php | Configuration settings for memcached caching | |
| config.php | Application specific core CodeIgniter configurations. No parameters have been added...just tweaked. | |
| database.php | Database configuration settings. | |
| email.php | Parameters for sending emails | |
| routes.php | This is where you map the URI to controllers (when you don't want to use the default mapping). A good example of this is what we're doing with the auth controller (i.e. Instead of going to /auth/login to log in, the site directs you to /core/login....there are more instances of that sort of thing) | |
| smarty.php | Smarty configuration settings | |
| tank_auth.php | Settings for the Tank Auth library that we use for authentication | |
Controllers
| File | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| auth.php | Handles authentication, registration, password and email resets. | |
| base.php | A dumb controller that redirects traffic that lands on the webroot to /core | |
| core.php | Controls the front page and various simple, logic-free pages. | |
| guide.php | Controls the rendering of guide pages | |
Core
| File | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| DJB_Router.php | Extends CI_Router to change all URIs whose specified class and/or method contains dashes to use underscores instead | |
Helpers
| File | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| combined_resource_helper.php | Provides a method for grabbing the current version of merged JS and merged CSS files. | |
| djb_autoload_helper.php | Used to autoload PSR-0 style DJB APIs found in the models/DJB directory | |
| table_helper.php | Includes a class (used by instantiating statically) to abstract out table names. | |
| tools_helper.php | Includes a class to be instantiated statically. The class is a tool for doing a boatload of general purpose stuff. | |
Libraries
| File | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Cache.php | Library to enable reading/writing to both memcache and apc cache | |
| DJB_Parser.php | Extends the CodeIgniter Parser object to leverage Smarty AND a template wrapper that is custom to the DJB | |
| phpass-0.1/ | PHP password hasher | |
| Smarty.php | Base class to initialize smarty | |
| Tank_auth.php | Core library for the Tank Auth plugin that manages account creation/logins/password resets/etc. | |
| Tpl.php | Extends the class defined in libraries/Smarty.php and adds a boatload of custom DJB features | |
Models
| File | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| DJB/ | DJB objects in PSR-0 style. | |
