New to CI, where to start?

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Hi there!

First of all, please excuse my english, I'm not a native english speaker. (-;


I am new to CodeIgniter (but also to OOP and the MVC pattern) and I really love how CI works. But I really don't know how to start.

A few months ago I started coding a community management platform, something that can allow users to post threads on a forum, share photos, post events, etc. Something that would be quitely complete, with an administration backend, multiple users permissions, theming, etc.

I started my project from scratch and in a procedural form. But I heard about CodeIgniter and wanted to give it a try. I would like to restart my project by building it around CI, but I really don't know WHERE to start.

For example: in the previous version, I had a "www" folder that contained the pages "that were not the core" : login form, userlist, etc. These pages where called by QUERY_STRING: http://localhost/this/is/my/page.html was asking for /www/this/is/my/page.php.

I managed the metadata of my pages (title, description, parent, conditions for the page to being displayed, etc) and the navigations menus into two tables of a database (one for the data, one for the menus).

This approach allowed me to automatically build breadcrumbs, display menus (taking into account the pages that the current user was allowed to display), etc.

How should I now redo the same thing with CI?


Could someone give me some help, please?


Thank you! (-:

[eluser]Natrium[/eluser]
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/co...tch-day-1/

They have 14 days so far.
This is day 14 with an overview of all the other days: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/co...ular-data/

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Hi Natrium!


I watched the four first days and..really, I do not know how this could help me. I do not see any navigation, any theming, etc. Nothing. I understood the controllers/models stuff and how they interract, but I do not just want to put some pages "as it", without CSS nor real navigation.

In my first project I had an init file that managed to call the configuration from a table, set user session, constants, etc. It is where all I want to do now was did. After that, a front controller was calling the correct page based on the URL, then submitted its contents to an output file that called the correct template (just a main HTML skel with functions calls to display the navigation menus, breadcrumb, the correct CSS file based on a user setting, etc) then finally echo'ed them all to the browser.

How can I manage that with CI? It is just about that. /-: