Thread

Before I purchased EE, I had some CI experience and I asked if it was easy to just do CodeIgniter work right along side EE and was given a positive impression. I think my expectations were a bit different as I guess I thought I could just create my own controllers and it would just work as expected. It seems there are some solutions that enable me to do that, i.e.:

http://paramore.is/think/entry/harnessing-the-power-of-codeigniter-in-expressionengine-2.0/

But I just wanted to get the opinion of some of the more experienced folks here. At first I just want to do a bit more complex form handling than then EE email module seems to offer, but I intend on getting a bit more complex and building full scale applications in and or around the EE part of the public website. I see this question has been asked many times and the common response is to look at the EE developer docs, which I have, but they don’t seem to offer a solution that would seem natural to a former CI developer.

So, what’s the best to way to integrate the two? Is the above URL considered a good method?

What about doing some more advanced form handling than the built-in tools? Is the common answer to look for a module/extension/add-on?

Thank you

OK, so I’m knee deep in Module making, but I just can’t seem to get it to work. I’ve done a very basic test. Here is mod.experience.php:

<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Experience {
 
 function __construct()
 {
  $this->EE =& get_instance();
 }
 
 public function test()
 {
  $data['test_message'] = "This is a test";
  $output = $this->EE->TMPL->parse_variables($this->EE->TMPL->tagdata, $data);
  return $output;
 }
}

And then here’s my template (very basic for testing purposes):

{exp:experience:test}
{test_message}
{/exp:experience:test}

However, when I load it, I get:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice
Message: Undefined offset: 0
Filename: libraries/Template.php
Line Number: 3456

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning
Message: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/beta.fireflyeducation.com.au/system/codeigniter/system/core/Exceptions.php:170)
Filename: core/Common.php
Line Number: 409

{test_message}

I suspect there’s something simple I’m overlooking. Does anyone see it?

Yep, parse_variables expects a multi-dimensional array—an array of arrays. Think of it as rows returned from the database.

So you should either use parse_variables_row,  or make your data look like this:

$data = array(
    array(
        'test_message' => 'This is a test.',
    ),
);

Awesome! Thank you!