Adding standalone blog

That script is apparently intended to operate as a stand-alone blog. While a CI view is capable of executing a great deal of PHP code, it is very likely that the script will have a lot of issues trying to co-exist with CI since it was never intended to work alongside CI.

You could try removing the code you've quoted and creating a helper which defines the sql_result() function to call $this->db->query() and return the query result, but you'll really have to pay attention to how it uses the result to make sure what you're returning will work with the script.

Bonfire

Practical CodeIgniter 3
CodeIgniter Testing Guide