[eluser]Derek Allard[/eluser]
I'm with you Lee, I can't live without the URL helper... always gets autoloaded, along with the session library.
Quick note through about base_url, "Typically this will be your base URL,
WITH a trailing slash". If you're using htaccess to rewrite, then it won't matter, but if you aren't, some of the functions may not work as expected.