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Dear all,

What this post is about:
I´m having problems understanding most of CodeIgniter regardless of the helpdocuments, and therefore i am looking for advice on how to actually *learn* the program and what is best to learn (coding-wise, OOP for example) in order to have a less steep learning curve for CodeIgniter.

First, I little history about me:
I started working with PHP since october 2010, and the goal is to create my own website(s).
I managed to think of a project for myself. As time went by, I got better at PHP and webdeveloping (although i’m still a beginner), but my site also got bigger and bigger.

Now i have this same site i started working on since october 2010 and it’s all written in a procedural way. It’s a pretty dynamic website and the structure of it is, to be honest, very bad. When an error occures or when i feel the need to change things radically or especially when i want to add extra functionality, then i start to realize the way i built the site is not efficient at all, since i loose much time in finding the errors or having change large sections in the case of adding relatively simple things/functionality to the site.

So in order to get a better structure, i was searching the web for everything related with systematic and structured webdevelopment, and so i got to the MVC-approach (discovered it last week).
After further information gathering on the net, i found info about frameworks, like Zend Framework and of course CodeIginiter, and i choose CodeIgniter just to try it.

My problem:
I started to read the documents of CI since a day or two ago, and i started at the exact beginning (and following the suggested reading as explained in the Introduction > Getting Started section).

I am now halfways throught the General subjects, but to be honest, i still am pretty blown away by the lots of new information. I do understand the principle behind it, but it’s too much information at once.

Besides, i am also pretty new to Object Oriented Programming. I do understand the principle of OOP after reading upon it, but i lack the experience in programming with the OOP approach (since i was justing working in the procedural way all that time that i was coding).

So my problem is: Should i continue to work with CodeIgniter despite my lack of experience and *complete* understanding of everything OOP related? (i have only the basic understanding of the OOP-principle, i do not have the understanding of every function OOP related etc.). Or is it better to leave CodeIgniter for the moment and focus on learning/gain experience with OOP??

Also, how did you learn CodeIgniter?

NetTuts CodeIgniter from Scratch video series was my best introduction to CI.  It helped a lot by watching someone else go through the steps at a pace I was comfortable with.
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/codeigniter-from-scratch-day-1/

“The key to a strong house starts with the foundation”

Although you could go ahead and start developing projects using CI without knowing OOP, I recommend you don’t.  If you want to actually get somewhere you need to fully understand what you are doing, you should understand what CI is doing for you and how it fundamentally works.

Nettuts is a great community where you’ll be able to learn a lot about the programming mechanics required to be successful in all aspects of development.

http://net.tutsplus.com/?s=oop

This tutorial may help you
phpro

Wow thank you all for your replies! 😊

I’ve started with practicing OOP a few days ago and it’s not that hard actually. I do have some confusion though:

Almost all tutorials define ‘objects’ and classes like real world ‘things’ (for example: a car, a human, a staffmember, a house, etc. etc.) but is this the sole purpose of OOP?

In other words, let’s say you have a basic site with the ability for users to register / login /upload pictures / send messages / and other basic things…

It’s obvious ‘users’ should be a class with some properties and methods, but should each real person that registers to the site, become an object instantiated from the users-class? Let’s say the site has 15 registered users, then i have 15 seperate objects?

Question 2 about this example: Is the only element of this site where i can implement OOP, the register/login system? (in regards to the users-class and it’s instantiated objects). How for example, should i implement OOP to other ‘less-real-world-like’ elements of this example site?