I had previously started writing my own ORM style model that plugged in to CodeIgniter, but after finding PHP ActiveRecord and then finding a Spark wrapper for PHP ActiveRecord to integrate in to CodeIgniter, I have since abandoned the “base_model” project, and I’ll show you how to integrate these 2 in this post.

To integrate PHP ActiveRecord in to your existing CodeIgniter project, follow these steps (from the root of your project & I’m assuming you already have your database settings set inside application/config/database.php, but TURN OFF AUTOLOADING of the Database class if you have it set – it will cause this to throw errors):

1. Install the Sparks Manager (if you haven’t installed it already)

php -r "$(curl -fsSL http://getsparks.org/go-sparks)"

2. Install the PHP ActiveRecord Spark

php tools/spark install -v0.0.1 php-activerecord

3. Activate PHP ActiveRecord in your controller. (I generally have a “MY_Controller” controller setup in between all my controllers and the CI_Controller to create an “Application Controller” of sorts. If you are a Rails developer, you know what I’m talking about. Application controllers give you a global controller to handle things like auth/etc.)

class MY_Controller extends CI_Controller {
    function __construct() {
        parent::__construct();
        $this->load->spark('php-activerecord/0.0.1');
    }
}

4. Create a table called “Users” with a few fields

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS users;
CREATE TABLE users (
    id BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    email_address VARCHAR(200) NOT NULL DEFAULT ''
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

5. Create your “User” model in application/models/User.php

 class User extends ActiveRecord\Model {} 

6. Test in one of your controller functions (possibly welcome/index)

$user = new User(array("email_address" => "beau.frusetta@gmail.com"));
$user->save(); 

## This should show you the User record that you just created
print_r($user); 

## Now do a simple find by email address
$user = User::find_by_email_address("beau.frusetta@gmail.com");
print_r($user); 

## Now do a simple find by primary key
$user = User::find(1);
print_r($user); 

And that’s basically it. There is tons of functionality built in to PHP ActiveRecord – check out the documentation to find everything you might need, and if you have any questions, let me know with a comment below.

I discovered this little gem yesterday in an email from Kenny. Looks like this is a “heroku” for PHP – I wonder if they’ll offer a “free” account like Heroku does on sign up?

Basically, I haven’t quite gotten in to it just yet. We just got our account setup for GetSparks.org, so it looks like we’ll be testing it over the next few days, but so far, it looks pretty slick!

Sign up for the beta today and see what it’s all about! When you get your invite, let me know what you think about it.

For whatever reason, and without any monetary compensation, I dove in to GetSparks.org…because it is fun, it’s exciting, and I’m being helpful to fellow developers across the world. I’m not making any money on it, and honestly, I don’t care. I’m developing something that will eventually help thousands of developers out there, that use the Codeigniter MVC framework, to easily install & update the libraries they build their sites with. It will help them put together a site faster then before – and they will look like rockstars because of it!

I can make money other ways, but there aren’t too many opportunities to be a part of something that big – something that has taken off (in day 3 now) as GetSparks.org has already.

Fucking amazing – loving it right now.

PEAR is a centralized package management system for PHP that has thousands of libraries built by developers all over the world. They have these nifty little commands you can run to install packages to your system, and with some configuration, your PHP project can then use these packages at will…although, I can’t tell you the last time I used PEAR, because it’s rather archaic in my opinion, and the times that I have had to use it, it was quite difficult to get it to “work the right way”.

Now – RubyGems are fantastic! RubyGems.org is a centralized package management system for the Ruby language. I’ve used this many times, and I love it. It’ll handle dependencies and install everything you need to your system, so all you have to do is call it up in your Ruby project, and you can use it. Hmm…like!

Finding Codeigniter libraries is kind of difficult. There are tons of fantastic libraries built for CodeIgniter out on the net, but it’s sometimes hard to find them, and it’s even hard to know if they suck or not without popping them in to your code and giving them a try.

Setting up ANOTHER system every time I move code is a pain in the ass. I’ve done it several times – when working in a new environment, you have to install all these libraries to your system, waste more time getting setup to go, and get all invasive with yet another environment. That sucks.

Cue in Sparks – the Package Management System for Codeigniter. First off, it solves 2 things right off the bat – it’s easy to find new packages (we’re finishing up the search in the alpha phase), and everything is attached to your project – not your system.

Sweet…a portable Codeigniter project with libraries that can be added/updated from a central repository in 1 command?!?!?!

A group of 4 of us came up with this idea, and put it together in a matter of a few weeks. It’s in ALPHA release right now, so we’re still finding/squashing bugs & adding new features. I would write more and more about how Sparks works in detail, but I’ll go ahead and let the site do the talking and let you experience it for yourself. Feel free to give us some feedback!

This is gonna change everything with Codeigniter!

Basically, I wanted to capitalize on some of the features of rails (that I love so much) and put them in to PHP to make dev times that much faster. I added things such as default functions on models (find, all, create, destroy), added in deployment with Capistrano, and added the ability to run “Phake” tasks – similar to rake tasks.

Setup is really easy – I’ve written up some basic installation instructions with the documentation I’ve put together.  Would love to hear what you think/comments/questions/whatever.  I’ll definitely be adding to this site & framework every once in a while – now I just gotta figure out git tagging so I can tag the versions right on Github.

PEACE!

Today, I get an email titled “Opportunity Knocks” from a local company in town, giving the same old canned message that was spruced up a little to be marginally personalized.  I was told he searched for “php developer phoenix” and he found me (I rank #1 for that search term).  Ok – I read on – and it was basically a soft recruitment letter – pretty standard.

I responded back that I wasn’t looking for full time work, but I’d be open to any contract/freelance work, as I had recently left a company to go back out on my own. He responded shortly after and said, “How about sending me a resume and I’ll set up a few face-to-face meetings with the peeps here?”.

Hmmm…

Well, I don’t have a resume, I haven’t updated my resume in years. Hell, the resume I used to desperately get a job with 944 Magazine was the same resume I had that I made in high school – clearly it worked, but it was old, outdated, and is a constant reminder of “old business”.  If you know me…Craig…this is directed at you haha…you know that I loathe “old business” methodologies – not all, but most.  I still prefer the good old “hand shake and a promise” – something about that just screams “business” to me, but everything else, meh, I can do without.

Apparently I said something to ruffle the feathers, because after my response of “Look at the links in my sig – that’s my resume – I’m pretty confident in the wealth of information you’ll find about me as a person/developer/etc on google”, I was told that I was “being arrogant, cocky and feeling entitled” and that those “are not a qualities we are interested in”.

Whoa…what?

Whoa what? Being arrogant and cocky? I think you completely misunderstood my last email, and now you’re telling me that I’m an “apprentice” because I told you I don’t have a formal “resume” anymore? I’m not an old dude with a pony tail – nor a web developer that wasted years in college and have 9 million microsoft/google/etc certifications – it’s all worthless – real world experience is where it’s at.

Wow – this went downhill pretty quick…and FYI, in the “real world”, a piece of paper listing accomplishments is still just a piece of paper – the proof is in the pudding, and you’ve yet to see any of my work (you’ve seen my blog and probably DateDesigner.com) – neither of which I care to “defend” to you.

The only arrogant person in this conversation is you right now…you probably need to chillax a little. An apology for flying off the handle is appreciated.

It gets better – I just got this response:

Fair enough: I apologize for “flying off the handle”. Let me get back on my broomstick (apparently, I’m a witch?).

We do require a resume. Sorry, I can’t ask other managers and the co-founders of this company to “Look at the links in my sig – that’s my resume”. Seriously, that doesn’t cut it. To dignify and respect their time, they should only have to review a single-source document of your accomplishments (aka a “resume”). Everything they read online *could* be 100% BS (just as a resume could be), but it starts the process down the right road. No one has time to look at countless websites that have some reference to who you might be. Down the road, if we were truly interested, we would dig deeper (verify work history, check references, etc.).

You’re right, never saw any pudding. Also, I wasn’t being arrogant, I was being condescending (which was wrong and I apologize for that, too). Guess I was expecting to somehow be “wowed!” by your claim of being a “jQuery Expert”.

I reached out to you because you appeared to have an acceptable amount of experience in web development. I failed to conclude that you were a master of your craft. Being that you are, you are clearly out of our league as we are really just looking for someone who is pretty darn good at what they do.

Sorry to have bothered you.

And my response:

Again with the “crafty” email response – and a dodge at just apologizing, tucking your tail, and moving on.

I never claimed to be a jQuery expert, I mentioned that my budd had said that. That was meant to be a joke, but clearly that wasn’t conveyed – or understood. I don’t claim to be an expert at anything – I do however know that I’m pretty f***in good at the skills I do possess.

My flip flops, t-shirts, and bedazzled jeans don’t do well in corporate culture – neither do resumes and obviously me – this is why I’m a full time freelancer. I loathe “old school” business methodologies, and can’t stand to be a part of them.

A bit of advice – especially in an ever competitive tech industry, hire people, not resumes. You could have easily brought me in to “meet the peeps” with a bit of information about me – you know, doing your job with recruiting, you gather information and report it back to those that control your strings. But now, you’ll just be on the hunt for another drone – another resume submitter…someone whom which I’ll never be again.

Thank you again for yet another captivating response XXXXX, I’m really looking forward to the next one!

Yes – now I’m just being an ass, but hey, it’s the amusement that I needed today. Back to the grind – see ya on the flip side!

RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|sitemap\.xml|robots\.txt|user_guide|blog|public|favicon\.ico|LiveSearchSiteAuth\.xml)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

If you notice, I have some other stuff in there to not exclude from passing to index.php like a sitemap.xml, the user_guide directory, the blog directory, a “public” directory (that I use for css/images/js), etc.

You set that in your .htaccess file first, then go into your config.php file and set this:

$config['index_page'] = "";

Basically, what that does, is that removes the whole site from processing through index.php in the URL bar (it still goes through there as far as I know, but doesn’t show it), specifically when using Codeigniter built-in functions like redirect().

Figured I’d share that little nugget of knowledge…happy coding!

CodeIgniter – PHP MVC Framework

My first shot at CodeIgniter was with DateDesigner.com (by persistent recommendation from @strebel).  Wow…once you grab the concept of the MVC framework, CodeIgniter makes your life tremendously easier when throwing together a site.  I literally thumbed through documentation and built DateDesigner.com in 30 days (scratch to launch).  I have learned how to set it up better and have learned a lot after putting together a few more sites with it (Twitrratr.com, FindMyDogADate.com, BajaSurVacationRentals.com), so now when I go back through some of the DateDesigner.com code, I curse myself a little as I refactor.

Have you built any sites with CodeIgniter?  Do you have an cool plug-in’s for CodeIgniter that you can suggest?

jQuery – Javascript Framework

Now – I have sucked at javascript for going on…ummm…ever?  It was actually @chuckreynolds that intro’d me to jQuery, but at the time, I still didn’t get it – because I was just too lazy to take a good look at it.  Well, again, my first shot at jQuery was on a simple interface tweak in DateDesigner.com, but it has spurred off on to nearly every site I work on now (including all of the 944 web sites internal/external).  There are a plethora plug-in’s available for jQuery – I’ve recently worked with jCarousel and a few others.

Do you have any jQuery plug-in recommendations?  Anyone know of any where I could essentially paginate images in 2 columns like a book/magazine w/o using flash?

The original site was created in ColdFusion and has been active for quite some time, however, the good people at BajaSurVacationRentals.com were experiencing not only downtime, but they have been overspending with Google Adwords to essentially “buy traffic” (not conversions), and have been hitting a cap when trying to expand.

My friend Erica, who is the Director of Sales & Marketing there, approached me about how they could expand because she was consistently hitting a wall with their current developer.  I took a look at the site and suggested that the site be written in PHP using the CodeIgniter framework to ensure that even if I get hit by a bus, there are more PHP developers out there than there are ColdFusion developers, and PHP is not so much of a dying technology.

Erica wanted to keep the look & feel of the site, so I basically spruced it up a little, and completely re-wrote the whole site (custom CMS included) in PHP & CodeIgniter.

We’re currently working on an SEO strategy to build traffic mainly organically instead of paying thousands of dollars buying traffic from Google.  After a little over 1 week after launch, the site is ranking quite highly on popular keywords for cabo rentals per my reports from the best keyword ranking tool out there.

I’ve heard there are some good deals to be had on both airfare and villa rentals in cabo these days…maybe you should go check the site out and plan a trip down to cabo?

Oh yeah…they also are on twitter as @caborentals – follow them for special announcements and so forth.

As a web developer, I have many things that I factor in when developing a new site, or adding on to an existing site, and you know, people could really save some cash if I didn’t have to spend extra time making Internet Explorer play nice like the other browsers do with no “extra” help.

Let’s say that some normal markup would take about 10 hours…well I’ll quote it out as 13+ just because of that extra bit I’m going to have to spend on making Internet Explorer display the same way that the other browsers do just because they conform to standards.

So do yourself a favor…if you want to save some development costs, spread the word, Internet Explorer is the devil as far as XHTML/CSS is concerned – it just HAS to be different and it is costing YOU more money.

I think Microsoft did it that way, because you know you didn’t pay for that Office software you are using…so they are just stickin’ it to ya in another way! hahahaha

Download Firefox or Download Safari – and save your soul!!!