If you have created websites in PHP, you have probably dealt with some of the same code or coding tasks—such as pagination or image manipulation— repeatedly as the need for exactly the same type of code is repeated from project to project and site to site.
These often-repeated segments of PHP code can certainly be copied, pasted, and customized as needed, but there is a better way. You can use a PHP framework.
A PHP framework will help you create projects more quickly while providing better security and, often, easier implementation thanks to included libraries, helpers, and classes that can cut out a lot of repetitive work.
There are several useful PHP frameworks, but for the purpose of this article, I will focus on CodeIgniter, as it is easy to learn, and effective for ecommerce site development. Specifically, I will enumerate some of the frameworks features; discuss its use of the Model-View-Controller software meta pattern; and list some of the benefits it offers to developers working on ecommerce-focused projects.
What is CodeIgnitor?
CodeIgniter is a useful framework for programmers that want to speed their work and create stable and light applications. It is helpful for web developers that want:
- Ease of use. CodeIgniter is simple to learn—you can create a basic CMS in 20 minutes or less.
- A secure application. One of the best parts of CodeIgniter is its security. You can create stable and secure applications with the minimum of work. The framework features (a) XSS filtering which can be enabled globally or upon request; (b) URI security; (c) registerglobals_ setting turned off; and (d) form validation classes that filter and prepare data for processing to name a few features.
- Easy setup. To set up CodeIgniter, you need to download the framework and upload to your server. Then open /system/application/config/config.php and change
<? $config['base_url'] ?>to your application URL. If you install in the root of your web server or on a subdomain, I'd recommend doing the following:<? $config['base_url'] = "http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/'; ?>. - A light framework. CodeIgnitor is very light and uses very few resources. It features classes that measure the load time of your PHP code such as Benchmarking Class and the Profiler.
- Model-view-controller architecture.
The MVC architecture
The Model – View – Controller (MVC) architecture separates the logic (or business model) from a site's presentation. It is very useful for code organization, and it is an architecture that another development language, Ruby on Rails, has been very successful at promoting.
Using the MVC architecture, you can store the code that is presented to the site visitor in one section of the site's file hierarchy, and then store the site processing data separately.
The Model represents the data structures and is the layer that processes the data needed for the View, or the data received from the view (trough $_POST). It also works with the database, including retrieval, inserts, updates, and deletes.
The View is the information presented to the user, which typically includes HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The View can be a web page or a part from a web page, depending on the template structure you desire.
The Controller serves as an intermediary between the Model and the View. It sends to the View the data received from the Model and to the Model the data received from the View.
The MVC architecture is particularly useful for ecommerce development teams that have different developers working a site's back-end and front-end. In this sort of a work arrangement, the back-end developers will work in the Models and Controllers and will serve the front-end developers with the processed data to be used in Views.
CodeIgniter Is Especially Good for Ecommerce
CodeIgniter is good for ecommerce developers. As I mentioned in the features above, I believe it is very secure, stable, light and easy to use. The classes incorporated in CodeIgniter dovetail well with the standard or usual development tasks required for creating an ecommerce website.
For example, since version 1.7.2, the framework has included a Cart Class, which was developed for ecommerce projects. And there are a number of other ready-made classes that make it feasible to create a basic, working ecommerce-shopping cart in a few hours of development time. These ecommerce-enabling classes include, the Active Records Database class; an email class; uploading classes; image manipulation classes; form validation classes; pagination classes; session class; and an excellent URI class, to name a few.
