The application so far - PHP

Welcome to the fourth episode of the series entitled “Building a Blogger with the Code Igniter PHP framework.” Comprised of seven approachable articles, this series steps you through the development of a blog application using this friendly – yet powerful -- PHP framework. We include copious code samples to demonstrate how to use the MVC pattern to develop a real-world program.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

By: Alejandro Gervasio

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December 30, 2008

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Before I go straight to the point and show you how to incorporate into the blogger the ability to insert user comments into a MySQL table, first I'd like to list the two source files created in the previous article. They were actually the driving force of this web application. This way, you'll get a good grasp of how these files looked before we modify them as I explained earlier.

That being clarified, below are the respective definitions for the controller class and the view file that make the blogger work as expected. Here they are:

// definition for 'blogger.php' file (located at /system/application/controllers/ folder)

class Blogger extends Controller{

function Blogger(){

// load controller parent

parent::Controller();

// load database class and connect to MySQL

$this->load->database();

// load pagination library

$this->load->library('pagination');

// load helper

$this->load->helper('url');

}

// display all blog entries

function blogs(){

$data['title']='Blog Entries Listing';

$data['result']=$this->db->get('blogs',3,$this->uri->segment(3));

// set pagination parameters

$config['base_url']='http://127.0.0.1/codeigniter/index.php/blogger/blogs/';

$config['total_rows']=$this->db->count_all('blogs');

$config['per_page']='3';

$config['full_tag_open']='<div id="paginglinks">';

$config['full_tag_close']='</div>';

$this->pagination->initialize($config);

// create pagination links

$data['links']=$this->pagination->create_links();

// load 'blogs_view' view

$this->load->view('blogs_view',$data);

}

// display all blog comments

function comments(){

$data['title']='Blog Comments Listing';

$this->db->where('blog_id',$this->uri->segment(3));

$data['result']=$this->db->get('blogs_comments');

// load 'blogs_comment_view' view

$this->load->view('blogs_comment_view',$data);

}

// definition for 'blogs_view.php' file (located at /system/application/views/ folder)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<head>

</head>

<body>

<?php foreach($result->result_array() as $blog):?>

<?php endforeach;?>

<?php echo $links;?>

</body>

</html>

// definition for 'blogs_comment_view.php' file (located at /system/application/views/ folder)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<head>

</head>

<body>

<?php if($result->num_rows()>0):?>

<?php foreach($result->result_array() as $comment):?>

<p><strong>Author: </strong><?php echo $comment['author'];?></p>

<p><strong>Comment:</strong></p>

<?php endforeach;?>

<?php endif;?>

</body>

</html>

As you can see, the controller class is the module responsible for fetching all of the blog entries and their corresponding comments from the respective MySQL tables. The two additional views are tasked with displaying this data in the form of HTML pages.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that the blogger in its current state offers limited functionality, since it doesn't provide users with a web form for posting their comments on a particular entry. To perform this operation, first it's necessary to define a brand new method within the controller, and second, the signature of the "blogs_comments_view.php" file must be modified to include the online form.

It sounds like hard work, right? Not when using Code Igniter! In the section to come I'll be showing you how to complete these tasks, so click on the link below and keep reading.

Next: Inserting comments with a Blogger controller class method >>