Updated News Tutorial

Hey, I'm glad you're not going to give up! I too remember having problems with the tutorial, and I remember thinking exactly what you're thinking -- how are they going to attract new users if the darn tutorial doesn't even work? I remember moving on from the tutorial, leaving it unfinished, and just starting to work on a real project.

After reading your post, I did a clean CI install and cut-and-pasted my way through the tutorial. I missed the part about creating a success page, so I got an error, but after creating the success page, everything worked. The links to the news items are correct in my case. I called the item I entered first-news, and the link to it is http://localhost/citutorial/news/first-news, so it works.

I don't know what the problem might be in your case, but as tedious as it may sound, go over it again, and make sure every step got done. The wrong capitalization of file names can cause problems, so double-check that. Also, if you get the wrong links to your news items, what are those wrong links? How are they wrong?

What is your level of PHP knowledge and programming in general? Are you starting all three at once (programming, PHP, and CI)?

Well, all I can recommend is patience. Programming is like watchmaking, very detail oriented, and small things keep the whole thing from working. If you have general programming, PHP, or MySQL questions, a great forum is http://community.sitepoint.com. It gets a lot of traffic, and most of the people there are pretty friendly. I can also suggest http://stackoverflow.com/, but on a read-only basis. The people there tend to bite newbies asking "dumb" questions, but the answers they do give are really good!

Hey, don't work without a PHP debugger. Several free IDEs have this features built in. Two are NetBeans and CodeLobster. Without a debugger, it's like you're driving with a blindfold on -- you are going to crash!