I have seen a few people asking how to load a view from a database (or something other than a physical file in the “views” folder).
In my particular case, a client wants the ability to edit HTML and TEXT email templates. Without giving them direct access to editing the physical files, I decided to move the views being used for email to the database instead. Continue reading
Out of the box, CodeIgniter has a good CAPTCHA helper to use in your web applications. Here is a simple example of how to get a new CAPTCHA image without having to reload the page 
Basic Controller
class Welcome extends CI_Controller {
private $captcha_path = 'assets/img/captcha/';
public function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
}
public function index()
{
$this->load->helper(array('captcha'));
$captcha = create_captcha(array(
'word' => strtoupper(substr(md5(time()), 0, 6)),
'img_path' => $this->captcha_path,
'img_url' => $this->captcha_path
));
$data = array(
'captcha' => $captcha
);
$this->session->set_userdata('captcha', $captcha['word']);
$this->load->view('welcome', $data);
}
}
The View (jQuery used for UI buttons and altering CAPTCHA image ‘src’ attribute)
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.23/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.18/themes/blitzer/jquery-ui.css">
<script>
$(function(){
$('#new_captcha').button({
text: false,
icons: {
primary: 'ui-icon-refresh'
}
}).click(function(event){
event.preventDefault();
$(this).prev().attr('src', 'welcome/new_captcha?'+Math.random());
});
});
</script>
<?php echo $captcha['image']; ?>
<a href="#" id="new_captcha">Reload CAPTCHA</a>
Modified Controller Continue reading
In a lot of my controllers, I use pagination along with the HTML <base> tag’s href attribute for relative link URLs.
Example URL: http://www.domain.com/admin/users/index/pagination_offset
HTML Base tag: <base href=”http://www.domain.com/admin/”>
What this means, is I usually have to build pagination’s base_url option based on where I am and what information is being passed in the URI. A lot of times it ends up looking something like…
$this->load->library('pagination', array(
'base_url' => $this->uri->segment(2) . '/' . $this->uri->segment(3) . '/' . $this->uri->segment(4),
'total_rows' => $total_rows,
'per_page' => 20,
'uri_segment' => 4
));
What I decided to do what extend the core CodeIgniter URI class to provide a basic slice method to grab a chunk of the URI by applying PHP’s array_slice function to the segments property of the URI class. Continue reading
Load the helper:
$this->load->helper(‘database’);
Call the function:
$enums = field_enums(‘table_name’, ‘field_name’);
For a while I had been wanting to author a generic database table model for CodeIgniter. Here are the results of those efforts… Continue reading