The Easy Way

Intead of hitting the Return key on your keyboard, hit the Enter key on the number pad. The new line that gets created will have the leading * and you can continue your comment. If you are on a laptop, hit function Return since you may not have a number pad.

The Slightly Harder Way

If you don’t want to fling your hand all the way over to your number pad and would prefer to just hit the normal Return key to continue your comment, you can create a TextMate Snippet to get TextMate to enter the leading * on the new line.

• Open the Bundle Editor
• Create a new Snippet
• Name the Snippet something like “phpdoc newline”
• Clear the default snippet text and enter this regular expression

${TM_CURRENT_LINE/(.*\/$)|.?(\/*(?!.*\/)).|./(?1:
:
(?2: ) )/}

• Set Activation: Key Equivalent
• Click in the Activation text box and press your Return key
• Set Scope Selector: source.php comment.block

Thank you to Clay Loveless for blogging about this Snippet

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model_name[attribute_name]
For Example...
contact[first_name]
contact[last_name]
etc.

I do this so that I can easily retrieve all the attributes for each model and then quickly store them to the database using CodeIgniter’s database helper functions. For example, taking advantage of the Active Record Insert Syntax, I might write PHP code like this…

[php]
…
$contact = $_POST['contact'];
$this->db->insert(“contacts”, $contact);
…
[/php]

When I started to use jQuery to do some client side javascript validation on my forms it was not immediately obvious to me that I needed to escape the square brackets in the jQuery calls.

[javascript]

[/javascript]

Due to javascript’s encoding, you need to use double slashes – not just a single slash – to escape the square brackets.

I have found CodeIgniter and have now built 3 sites with it. It’s simple, easy to use, speeds up development, has great documentation and, best of all, has won me as a fan. My most recent CodeIgniter project is an educational/e-commerce site about Rebounding with the Cellerciser While developing the site and reading the site content, I was convinced of the many reasons to use a Cellerciser I’ve now been using a Cellerciser for about 3 months and I love this thing!

All this is to say that I’m developing with CodeIgniter now and I’m customizing my development for PHP5. Even though CodeIgniter is not strictly a PHP5 framework (it will run under PHP4 or PHP5) it does try to detect if it’s being run under PHP5 and has several chunksk of PHP5 specific code that get loaded if you are using PHP5. Then, you can code your own models and libraries using strict PHP5 syntax – taking advantage of all the goodness that PHP5 brings to the table.

I took a day or two to look into Kohana which is basically the PHP5 only version of CodeIgniter. Kohana, being pure PHP5, has a few advantages over CodeIgniter. Here is a great reivew comparing Kohana and CodeIgniter In the review there are also a few tips on integrating the Zend Framework in with you CodeIgniter project – a much better use of the Zend Framework than building exclusively upon it.

Even though I exclusively use PHP5 and Kohana takes much better advantage of PHP5 than CodeIgniter does, I ended up sticking with CodeIgniter for the following reasons:

• Better documentation (although Kohana’s is very good too)
• I felt like CodeIgniter had a more secure and substantial user base
• Kohana does not have any unit testing (but it is coming in the next release)
• More add-ons (ignited code) for CodeIgniter adding any “missing” feature you can think of

My biggest complaint with CodeIgniter is the session handling. Session data is stored on the client side in a cookie. So you are limitted to 4kb of data. I prefer to store session data on the server side in a database. There are several add-ons for CodeIgniter that give you server side, database storage for session data.

If you have any questions about CodeIgniter, or comments about CodeIgniter vs Kohana, please feel free to share your thoughts!