Codeigniter is a great framework – I use it exclusively because of it’s flexibility and relative ‘lightness’ – but what use is a framework without libraries to extend its usefulness? (well, not much use, naturally.) Here is my personal list of codeigniter libraries I would struggle to live without.
QuickAuth
Made by a good friend of mine, the mini-codeigniter-wizard dave blencowe, quick-auth is an authentication library with simplicity in mind. It is incredibly easy to configure, and is simple enough to be easy to extend for your own purposes. All this makes it perfect for small-scale web applications and when you need to throw something up quickly.
PayPal lib
Ecommerce is, for the novice, just plain confusing. Sometimes, all that’s needed is a simple PayPal integration to your site. Again, PayPal lib is perfect for this. I used PayPal lib for a job directory site for a client, and unfortunately, the PayPal integration was the easiest and smoothest part of the job. Nonetheless, I would use and recommend PayPal lib any day for simple integration.
R&OS PDF Class
While there is no perfect PDF class out there for Codeigniter, R&OS PDF is by far the best. I’ve been involved in multiple projects before where I’ve needed to produce reliable and predictable PDFs for reports and/or invoices. Where other PDF Classes have failed me, R&OS has always came through. Highly recommended, and I wouldn’t be able to produce PDFs without it.
Unzip Class
Ever wanted to support bulk archived uploads? Ever wanted to create theme or plugin archives that installed themselves, wordpress style? It’s certainly possible, thanks to the Unzip Class.
Curl Library
Curl can get pretty messy at times, so this wrapper cleans your code up a bit and keeps things looking neat!
Edit: @damiangostomski has notified me that actually it is very easy to zip/unzip files natively with PHP4 or later. Take a look here!
On the Zip Archive page, it still makes it look more complicated then it needs to be… The last example 9at time of writting) is all you need
$zip = new ZipArchive; $zip->open('test.zip'); $zip->extractTo('./'); $zip->close();Thanks John, I appreciate your support of Quickauth! Good writing and I look forward to more articles.
Thanks John for this article. I have recently started to redesign my site using CodeIgniter. This article is very helpful.
No problem!
Have you tried wkhtmltopdf? May be a bit more robust for more complex layouts.
I can’t say I have. I’ll have to give it a shot next time I need PDF functionality.