On DevSnippets.com there's a new post looking at the CodeIgniter framework and some examples to get your started on using it.

Choosing a good PHP frameworks can help you develop complex Rich Internet Applications quickly, with a best practices oriented approach, and saving a lot of time reusing code snippets that are already available. There are a lot of interesting PHP frameworks you can choose for your next web project. Today we will focus on one of my favorite PHP Frameworks: CodeIgniter.

They briefly talk about why CodeIgniter is a good choice for your development, how to get it installed and have a list of some great tutorials that can help get you started:

• Generating PDF files using CodeIgniter
• A sample Facebook application with CodeIgniter
• CodeIgniter and Ajax using jQuery tutorial
• CodeIgniter Event Calendar
• Creating a file hosting site with CodeIgniter

Michael Wales has taken a look at what effect HipHop could have on your CodeIgniter application (or lack there of).

So, what does this mean for the CodeIgniter community? In short, absolutely nothing. Most CodeIgniter developers are building applications that will run on shared hosts, virtual private servers or a cloud-based virtualization system. Of that very large group of our community, an extremely small number have the capability to compile the HipHop binaries or alter their configuration in order to serve HipHop pages.

He points out that, for most developers and applications, time is better spent optimizing the actual application - things like reducing the I/O needs, caching, etc. HipHop, unless you have a very high demand and load on the application, won't give much of a gain. He gives the example of Facebook's load and how even it would only relatively recently would benefit from the tool.

In a new post to his blog Phil Sturgeon looks at creating sharable code for your controllers in a CodeIgniter application (DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself).

The idea is that most of your controllers share something in common with each other. For example: All admin controllers need to make sure a logged in user is present and that they are an administrator. A public controller may want to load a theme for your application and load default user data, navigation links or anything else frontend related.

The problem is solved by creating a base controller - in his example its one called MY_Controller that follows the CodeIgniter naming convention and allows you to easily make other controllers that extend it. You'll also need to make a small addition to your config.php file to get the base controllers working correctly and make them able to be found.

On the Okada Design Blog there's a recent tutorial posted showing you how to create a simple calendar system by combining the CodeIgniter PHP framework and jQuery for some of the client side features.

This blog inspired me to make an event calendar using CodeIgniter. You can download Bari's source files. Please unzip it and save them. We are going to use them later. Bari puts a demo here. We are going to add this to CodeIgniter. I continue using BackendPro for this purpose.

Using the BakcendPro as a base, they create everything else to wrap around it: some CSS and Javascript, a database table to store the events, and the PHP code - the controller, model and views for general viewing, editing and creating a new calendar. Full code is provided for all both in cut&pasteable code blocks and in a downloadable file.

In a new post from the Ask About PHP blog they look at handling different types of errors in a popular PHP framework, CodeIgniter, most being included with the framework.

The way I see it, there are 2 types of errors we have to work with. The ones which are displayed out in nice friendly text to your users, and the type which are hidden and shown only to you as the coder to figure out where something has gone wrong. CI provides the means to do both, thankfully.

They look at the error handling the framework provides for the system/application errors that might happen in the normal course of the use of your PHP application and the configuration file settings you can change to customize the level you want to report at.

Just a quick note today from the CodeIgniter project - if you've been using their Subversion server to pull your latest copies of the framework down, they've made a change.

Our Subversion repositories have moved. Please update your repositories or check out new ones from the new location: http://svn.ellislab.com/CodeIgniter/trunk

The normal downloads (and archive files) are still available on the CodeIgniter download page.

Phil Sturgeon has posted a new tutorial over on the NETTUTS.com site about working with REST services in CodeIgniter. He shows both sides of things - using REST services and making them.

CodeIgniter is becoming well known for its power as a PHP based web application framework, but it's not often that we see examples of it being used for anything else. Today we'll learn how we can use CodeIgniter to create a RESTful API for your existing web applications, and demonstrate how to interact with your own API or other RESTful web-services, such as Facebook and Twitter.

He has the sample code hosted over on his github account where you can pull down the source and follow along from the beginning. His application is created to be flexible enough for multiple output formats (xml, json, html) and respond correctly to the HTTP request types like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. On the other side he shows how to consume the services via different methods like file_get_contents and cURL.

In a project she's been working on Lorna Mitchell was frustrated with something the CodeIgniter framework does natively - escape SQL statements done through the databaase layer's "select()" method. Thankfully, there was a simple fix to turn this behavior off.

I've been getting increasingly impatient with its tendency to try to escape my SQL code for me - this is a really useful default feature but it seems to assume I don't know what I'm doing and so it puts backticks all over perfectly acceptable SQL code, very annoying!

Thanks to a reply on twitter from damiangostomski to her frustrations she found the optional second parameter you can give the "select()" method, a boolean that tells it whether or not to escape the query (it's mentioned here) for those that were wondering.

Janos Rusiczki has released a library for CodeIgniter that makes integration of the Postmark service simple.

What are transactional e-mails, you might ask? The answer is: e-mails generated by a web application after an user action such as registration, requesting a password reminder, receiving a reply to a comment, etc. The problem me and many developers faced is that sometimes the client's servers are blacklisted and these e-mails land in the users' spam folder. This is where Postmark comes to the rescue, hopefully.

The Postmark API accepts JSON encoded content via a POST request that includes the to, from, message (plain text or HTML) and an API key. The Postmark service is currently in closed beta but you can still grab the library from either this direct download or on its github repository.

Derick Allard (of the EllisLab team) has posted an update about the current and future state of the CodeIgniter framework and its community.

Some of the updates include:

• That Jamie Rumbelow has taken over as a Community Chieftain
• Rick Ellis is on twitter now
• A long list of bugs and updates to the CodeIgniter source

And, of course, he (sort of) answers the constant question he and his fellow developers get - when will CodeIgniter 2 be released and what will be in it?