Thread

Brian - Wondering if you packaged your Community Auth as a Sparks package, if it might help expand the uptake of your code by a broader user base (and get you more feedback and testing)?

I took a detour for several weeks away from my initial attempt at learning CI, and am now back trying to spin up on it again, and seeing how Sparks helps load in lots of other modules without messing with what’s already installed in someone’s environment.

I just don’t understand it enough yet (Sparks, or even CI for that matter) to know if Community Auth is appropriate as a Sparks package, or whether it’s too much of a foundation to where it needs to be included with my base CI installation?

Thank you.

Well, I’ve never used sparks. I’m actually a little opposed to its use, and I’ve heard arguments for using it, but it’s just not for me. I use almost nobody elses CI libraries, and use very little code from other people in general.

Community Auth started out as a project where I was asking if people wanted to join together and make the authentication system that would be useful for everyone. What I found was that there was almost no interest, and so I just did it by myself. I had experience with building an authentication system in procedural PHP that used PHP’s $_SESSION, so I basically used that as a base for Community Auth. At this point, there would be absolutely no resemblence between the two applications.

I see there have been quite a few downloads, and I do hope that people will use it and find it useful for their authentication system, and also to learn a little about CI. I have my own reasons for not really caring how much Community Auth gets used. For one, I just see the majority of CI users as being unable to understand PHP, and I really don’t want to have to support hundreds of questions related to installation and simple PHP issues that have more to do with CI installation than anything. With few exceptions, this is what I’ve experienced so far.

At this point, since I have so much invested in Community Auth, and since nobody else has really helped, I’m just going to do what I want to do, and when I want to do it. If you or somebody else is interested in contributing to Community Auth, I would still consider partnering up, but there are only a couple people in this forum that I could consider working with, and I think they are as busy as I am, making that possiblity almost an impossiblity.

I know there are the favorite auth libraries like Ion, Tank, AG, DX. Maybe I left out a couple. Maybe someday Community Auth will be a favorite, but I want to emphasize that that is not the goal. If there is a goal, its that in my own business I want to produce websites for clients faster than ever. Community Auth is the foundation that helps me do that now. Im a freelancer, and if I get to a point where I hire a dev to come along side me, they’d be required to use Community Auth. It just works for me because I know it.

That said, especially since you are just learning, the best thing you can do for yourself is make your own authentication library or application. You’ll learn a lot about PHP and CI for sure.

Thanks Brian, this helps give me perspective on your contribution here.  BTW, I started a new install using your latest version (the one now supporting the “maintenance” mode - you think of everything!) to jump back into my learning of CI.  I’m trying to set things up so the Application and System folders are outside of the webroot - maybe not a good idea so early in my learning curve?  Can you tell me if this is a configuration Community Auth should support, so I know whether to shoot back issues found related to this or not?

For example, I kept seeing something related an issue loading ChromePHP, and found that line #105 in the main index.php file was hard coded to ‘application/libraries/ChromePhp.php’.

Thank you, and thanks again for all this code.  This is going to provide an amazing foundation for my CI education.

- CI Monkey

Yeah, you should have no issues if you change your application directory location. This is a CI install related issue. If you have a problem running ChromePHP and you are not using it, just comment out that line. I personally use the Firebug/FirePHP solution. You could need to change the path to the location of ChromePhp.php if you want it to work. I should probably include this in a hook or later down in the bottom of index.php so I can use the APPPATH constant instead of hard coding it. Thanks for the feedback!