Creating a Site with Codeigniter Without Database Support

codeigniterwebsites

What approach could You suggest, If I don't have mysql or other database support on webhost, but I need to store data ( textual information ) for website somewhere. It's informative site for school – approx 20 to 50 visitors per day, 6 to 7 categories with 3 to 5 subcategories.
Would xml files be normal ?

Best Answer

XML would be perfectly fine, especially with the amount of data I'm supposing you are going to be getting/generating, a csv type list with a parser of some sort (jscript, ajax, php) that could handle it would also be acceptable.

I would also contact your webhost to find out what they have for PHP support, because if they do it should have SQLite built in if nothing else. If your webhost has no dynamic languages allowed (PHP etc) I would just suggest scrapping them and finding another that supports what you need in the first place.

Related Solutions

Php – scalable multi-site strategy with codeigniter

Unless the db schemas are going to be different between the different sites but the codebase is going to be the same, IMO it doesn't really make sense to partition on databases but not code if you're going to need to do it for more than say 10 sites.

I think the Django framework has an interesting approach where they define site ID's in a database table where each site is associated with a different domain name and associate content with site id's (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/contrib/sites/).

What you could do I guess is figure out what would be the same and what would be different between the different sites and attach a site identifier field to any tables that would have site-specific functionality. This assumes that all sites will be using the same servers. That way you only have to deal with one database which will make deploying updates easier. Adding another site would only require inserting a database record. Authentication and authorization logic would be a little more complicated since you would need to verify that the credentials and permissions are valid for a given site but that shouldn't be too difficult.

Php templating with codeigniter

I generally prefer to create a "layout" file rather than having to include both a header and footer on every page. It's more flexible.

Here's a snippet from one of my projects:

ob_start();
include '../views/'.$templateFile;
$pageContent = ob_get_clean();
include '../views/layouts/'.$layoutFile;

All you have to do is enable output buffering, include the template, then call ob_get_clean() to nab the contents of your template and put it into a variable. Once it's in a variable you can include your main layout file, which should echo $pageLayout somewhere inside.

e.g.,

<html>
<head>
    <title>Your Site</title>
</head>
<body>
    <!-- header here -->
    <?= $pageContents ?>
    <!-- footer here -->
</body>
</html>

That said, surely Code Igniter has some kind of templating built in, no? I'm not familiar with it. Edit: Apparently it does not. Kind of silly really; with caching, the performance cost of a nice templating engine is negligible.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Php – scalable multi-site strategy with codeigniter

Php templating with codeigniter

Related Topic