Installation issue?

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Howdy all,

Starting my first foray into CI. Actually spent the last two weeks learning the Zend Framework so I suppose I'm learning MVC frameworks bass ackwards. I digress...

My dev environment right now is Win 7 running XAMPP 1.8.0.

I'm confused with the setup. In the Zend Framework all you do is install the lib, point the php.ini to it, and run zf create project xxx and you're off and running.

With CI, it doesn't seem as simple. I unzipped the lib to a folder into C:/CodeIgniter2.1.2 (and put the index.php in my "C:/XAMPP/htdocs/CI" folder) and pointed the app and sys folders to their respective CI lib locations on my drive. When I went through the tutorial I couldn't get home and about to show properly. The only way I could get it to show was to copy what I was editing in C:/CodeIgniter2.1.2/applications to "C:/XAMPP/htdocs/CI/applications".

Basically, I'm editing my code in the applications folder in the lib, but copying it over to the htdocs folder for the site to work. The strange thing is, I don't have to copy the contents, the code in the individual php files themselves can be blank.

Why is this? I understand the way it works with Zend, but I don't understand why we edit files in the CI library folder and then have to copy the file structure on the webserver (I mean, I think I understand why, when you go to url/[controller-class]/[controller-method]/[arguments] it's got to point to something from the webserver)).

I don't know if this is making any sense, I just find it difficult to get off the ground with CI.

Thanks for reading.

[eluser]Clooner[/eluser]
You kinda went off the beaten path by extracting your zip file in a different place and only placing your index.php in your webserver documents folder. This makes things a bit more complicated to get started since you will need to do a few extra steps.

Also Zend and CI are simply different frameworks and have not much in common and I would argue that CI in fact is much easier to wrap your head around.

The workings and installation are well documented on http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/

Also a quick overview of the flow can be found here http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-gui...pflow.html

[eluser]Aken[/eluser]
Zend is VERY different because it utilizes autoloading resources. That's why you add it to php.ini - then the autoloader has another path for it to look for specific PHP files.

CodeIgniter is much simpler in how it works - through basic include() and require() functions. It can only look for files on your web server (wherever XAMPP has access, basically - that might only include the /htdocs/ folder, I don't know for sure because I'm on a Mac).

You're making it difficult by assuming it works the same as Zend, which it definitely does not. I'd suggest you install it the recommended way first, and then figure out how it works and how you can customize it to your desires.