Help! OOP in CodeIgniter?

[eluser]ryepdx[/eluser]
I'm trying to change the Controller class so that all the classes that extend it automatically inherit a certain set of functions. For some reason though, this doesn't seem to be working. For example, I tried adding an index function to the Controller class, just to test things out. I made sure that the inheriting class didn't have an index function. I tried accessing the function and got a 404. Then I moved the function into the inheriting class and refreshed. The 404 went away and it worked.
After that I tried putting an echo statement at the end of the Controller class declaration to make sure I was editing the right file. Sure enough, the echo came back.

Has anybody come across this before? Do you know why this is happening? More importantly, is there any way I can accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish?
Thanks.