Introduction

Although instant messaging applications rule the universe of real time, Internet-based communications, a blogging application provides users with a useful and simple way to share personal ideas, thoughts, interests, and so forth with other people. Besides, building a blog application is by far much easier than creating a messenger program, particularly when using a friendly programming language like PHP.

I don't mean to imply, however, that it's possible to create a blogger in a few minutes in all the cases. Whether you're using a procedural programming methodology or an object-oriented approach, building an application like this requires time and an intermediate background in working with database-driven programs.

Even so, it's perfectly feasible to take advantage of a third-party PHP framework to accelerate considerably the development of any web application, and a blogger falls under this category. Of course, there are several software packages available on the web that permit you to build PHP programs very rapidly, but in this particular case I'm going to demonstrate how to create a blog application with Code Igniter (for more information visit its official web site at http://code igniter.com).

In case you haven't heard about it, Code Igniter is a powerful, comprehensive framework written in PHP 4 that provides developers with a robust set of classes and helpers that can be used for building different web applications by means of the Model-View-Controller pattern, which separates application logic from visual presentation.

Thus, in this series of articles I'm going to explain how to build a basic blogger with Code Igniter. I will explain it in a step-by-step fashion to allow you to get an excellent grounding in its main features, as well as learn how to implement the MVC approach in a real-world situation.

Also, it's fair to mention that the implementation of the core logic of this blog program will rely partially on the video tutorial available on Code Igniter's web site (so, many thanks to CI's development team for offering such an educational introduction to using the framework). I will hasten to add that the rest of the application's modules, including its visual presentation, record set paginating and other features will be largely improved.

That being said, it's time to get rid of the preliminaries and start developing this blog program using Code Igniter. Let's jump in!