Month: March 2007

Code Igniter: Installation and First Run

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Code Igniter is an PHP Application Development Framework – a toolkit for PHP developers. The main goal of Code Igniter is to enable developers to develop projects much faster than they could have done ( if they have started from scratch) by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries.

You can download Code Igniter from http://www.codeigniter.com/

How to Install:

1. Download the zip file from the above URL.

2. unzip the files and put them to your webserver where you want to. lets assume that you put it at codeigniter folder of your web server.

3. Open the application/config/config.php file with a text editor and set your base URL. lets asumme that your base URL is set like this:

$config[‘base_url’] = “http://localhost/codeigniter/”;

4. if you intend to use a database, open the application/config/database.php file with a text editor and set your database settings. Set the following variables according to your setup.

$db[‘default’][‘hostname’] = “localhost”;
$db[‘default’][‘username’] = “admin”;
$db[‘default’][‘password’] = “*****”;
$db[‘default’][‘database’] = “projectone”;
$db[‘default’][‘dbdriver’] = “mysql”;
$db[‘default’][‘dbprefix’] = “”;
$db[‘default’][‘active_r’] = TRUE;
$db[‘default’][‘pconnect’] = TRUE;
$db[‘default’][‘db_debug’] = TRUE;
$db[‘default’][‘cache_on’] = FALSE;
$db[‘default’][‘cachedir’] = “”;

5. now you are ready to run our installed piece of software. in order to run Code Igniter you have to visit the following URL in you web server.

http://localhost/codeigniter/index.php/

if your setup is correct then you will see a welcome page with heading

“Welcome to Code Igniter!”

Now you are ready to work with Code Igniter.

Note: if you try to access the Code Igniter installation like the following then you will definitely get an error message.

http://localhost/codeigniter/

http://localhost/codeigniter/index.php

By default Code Igniter follows (Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL and for this they use segment based URL which will come to next tutorial.

MediaWiki – Nice to have

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So far the journey of wiki has been very pleasant to me. I liked the wiki concept and technology it focuses. Mediawiki comes with lots of features and extensions which are really cool. But still i feel that there should be some very good features included in future MediaWiki. Here are my few thoughts:
1. More security options, such as section based protection. currently mediawiki have the option to protect a page not a section. we know in multi user environment many people can contribute their part in a single article. there might be the necessity to protect individual contribution rather than the complete page.

2. The wiki editor can be enhanced little bit to add few more options to make life bit easier. It is not right to expect an end user will know the complete wiki syntax to use it appropriately. May be a WYSIWYG in wiki mode will be good choice.
3. Article save and publish option. currently wiki does not have the ability to save an incomplete article. this option will really help the writers to write articles and publish them once its complete.  It will be also nice to have an auto draft options for articles. so that nothing is lost accidentally.

4. an integrated comments system for the article. it can be kept as an option in the article edit section and will be shown in the view of the article page.

5. last but not least , more of a web 2.0 featured. it will be really cool to load contents dynamically using AJAX and give it a look and feel of a web 2.0 site.

MediaWiki Book has been published

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Today my book has been published. It has been a long waiting for me. Finally it’s on the hands of the readers. I can’t wait to receive my copies. Lets hope that it will be well accepted by readers.

here are few pics from David, my development editor at Packt Publishing.

David with the book

David with the book

QEDwiki

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Have you ever thought how it will be if our traditional wiki is bundled with cutting edge Web 2.0 features such as Mashups and rich web experience to end user with different web services bundle together in a single place. well if you have not then you have all rights to think about it. Because IBM is preparing to launch its new product named “QEDwiki” and the first impression i got from the youtube session is just awsome. that is what IBM says about QEDWiki

“QEDWiki is a lightweight mash-up maker written in PHP 5 and hosted on a LAMP, WAMP, or MAMP stack. A mash-up assembler will use QEDWiki to create a personalized, ad hoc Web application or mash-up by assembling a collection of widgets on a page, wiring them together to define the behavior of the mash-up application, and then possibly sharing the mash-up with others. Mash-up enablers provide QEDWiki with a collection of widgets that provide application domain- or information-specific functionality. These widgets are represented within QEDWiki as PHP scripts.

When a user renders a page within a QEDWiki workspace, the QEDWiki framework processes the widgets on the server side and then generates a DHTML page that is sent to the browser for client-side processing. The framework includes a rich AJAX-enabled MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture so that each wiki page is a rich, interactive application for end users.”

here you can find more about QEDwiki.

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/qedwiki/

and for the youtube video, click here