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01-06-2009, 09:27 AM

[eluser]felyx[/eluser]
Well I am not used to frameworks as I just going to start working with CI after a couple of weeks of research on frameworks. I find CI very very promising. However I am very new to MVC approach aswell. My problem is that I had my own "system" which I was developing by. You might find it a bad way of doing things but still it worked for me. As you can see below in the code I had several (usually 2-4 part depending on the website's needs) dynamically loaded part of the page which was handled by my index.php (the code seen below). In the example below the website had a dynamic head part, a left and a right side. I can put there php code or html or both doesn't matter. I can even say that a page does not need to have different head section then the default so it will load the default if it doesn't find a specified one.

example:
http://www.somedomain.com/home -> will load home.php, home_head.php and home_right.php
http://www.somedomain.com/categories -> will load categories.php, categories_head.php and categories_right.php
http://www.somedomain.com/about -> will load about.php, home_head.php and home_right.php

My problem is that I do not know which one is the best (easiest) way of getting this work in a CI project. I read about extending controllers and that I can load views from within another views but I am not sure it will work how I want it to. If you could please help me I would be very grateful.

Basic example of my index.php:

Code:
&lt;?

 $URI = explode("/", $_GET['q']);

?&gt;

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

&lt;html&gt;

&lt;head&gt;

&lt;?

 if (eregi("^home$|^categories$",$URI[0])) include_once('./head/'.$URI[0].'_head.php');

 else include_once('./head/home_head.php');

?&gt;

&lt;/head&gt;

&lt;body&gt;

<div id="header">

header content...

</div>

<div id="wrapper">

           <div id="content">

               <div id="menu">

                       <a href="./home" title="Home" class="menu">Home</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="./categories" title="Categories" class="menu">Categories</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="./about" title="About" class="menu">About</a>

             </div>

            <div id="column-right">

                &lt;?

                if (eregi("^home$|^categories$",$URI[0])) include_once('./side/'.$URI[0].'_right.php');

                else include_once('./side/home_right.php');

                ?&gt;

            </div>

            <div id="column-left">

                &lt;?

                if (eregi("^home$|^categories$|^about$",$URI[0])) include_once($URI[0].'.php');

                else include_once('home.php');

                ?&gt;

            </div>

        </div>

    &lt;/body&gt;

&lt;/html&gt;

01-06-2009, 09:41 AM

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
You can use this approach, the part with a base template is what you want.

Or you could pick up a layout library.

01-06-2009, 10:05 AM

[eluser]Popcorn[/eluser]
The code you were using originally isn't great practice, what if you want to change a little html in the header? You have to change 4 files instead of 1.

I'd use xwero's method and use a base template.

01-06-2009, 11:05 AM

[eluser]cereal[/eluser]
I use a similar approach, without templates:

Code:
function index()

{

    $data['title'] = 'my homepage';

    $this->db->limit(1);

    $data['query'] = $this->db->get('news');

    $this->load->view('/common/head', $data);

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

    $this->load->view('/common/foo', $data);

}

01-06-2009, 12:15 PM

[eluser]felyx[/eluser]
Thank you for your answer, but I am not sure I understand what you mean by a "base template". Anyways I do not want to use templates. If I start using tpl engines which I actually don't need then it would further slow down the websites I build which I could avoid.

01-06-2009, 01:17 PM

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
The code you showed in your post is the base template, maybe you have another name for it like master page or something like it.

I use the name template because you can output html, xml, json all from the same data.

01-06-2009, 01:44 PM

[eluser]felyx[/eluser]
So you are suggesting that I make a main view file like a skeleton of the page and for the dynamic parts of the page I should load different views depending on what page of my website it is. I got one question, if I have php code which generates something inside one of the dynamic parts where should I place it? Just inside the dynamically loaded view file? Looks a bit messy to me. As I mentioned it before, sometimes one of my "heading" files have php inside them generating meta data and sometimes I just place static html (meta, title etc..) for a specific page, depends on what I need to achieve there. Same goes for the other dynamic parts. That is my problem at this point. Another problem which does not really belong here but sometimes a project requires me to add a lot of pages which only contain html code. What I mean is that a couple pages require php which I execute in the controller then call the view file but sometimes I need to add 30+ pages which only load a view file. Can I avoid somehow the need of using controllers in these cases? Sounds weird I know but doing the same for all pages (loading a view file only) feels a bit complicated since with the previous "system" I had I could do it with one line of php code.

01-06-2009, 04:30 PM

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
For your first question you can load it in the controller. For example load a partial page in the header.

Code:
// views/header.php

<h1>My site</h1>

&lt;?php echo $subheader ?&gt;

// controller

function some_action()

{

   $this->load->vars(array('subheader'=>$this->load->view('subheader','',TRUE));

}

The default view files can be overwritten at any time with the same method i used above.

For your second problem you can create a controller named static with a html method. Route all the static pages to that controller and method and change the post_controller function to

Code:
function post_controller()

{

   $CI =& get_instance();

   if($CI->uri->rsegment(1) != 'static' && $CI->uri->rsegment(2) != 'html')

   {

       $CI->load->view('pageparts/template');

   }

}

The beauty of not having a lot of code to deal with is that it's easy to change it to whatever you need. It is a raw way of dealing with templates but if you go for a library it will not be so easy to change it, if the developer didn't think of it.

01-06-2009, 05:19 PM

[eluser]felyx[/eluser]
xwero thanks for the answer again I will try what you have suggested.