Add It Up Development Blog | Building a PHP financial management app, one line of code at a time

8. August 2008

Controller, Model, and URL design

What’s in a name? Like I would imagine many programmers, I have a tendency to get a little anal about naming my Controllers and Models. Combine this with the default behaviour of CodeIgniter to parse the URL segments into controller/function/id parts, and it all begins to get very messy unless some careful thought is put into [...]

24. July 2008

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Even more independent web apps

In lieu of anything more informative to post (hey, I discovered Warcraft - if that’s not an excuse I don’t know what is), I’d like to link to a couple of new web applications launched recently by independent designer/developers. Cart45 is a simple and easy-to-install ecommerce application developed by Phil Thompson with Soapy Co and Richard [...]

12. July 2008

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To Parse or not to Parse, that is the question

When I first began to consider building a web application using CodeIgniter, one of the key aspects I had in my mind was to keep the HTML template files (the View in Model-View-Controller) as PHP-free as humanly possible. At that time, I was planning to develop an e-commerce application (this was before the launch of Magento), [...]

12. July 2008

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Woo! A theme for the blog

It’s naturally frustrating to be stuck with the default theme for a blog, so this weekend I took the opportunity to update the look of this site with a theme from WooThemes (via Elliot Jay Stocks, one of the designers for WooThemes). As a complete novice at WordPress it probably took longer than it should to [...]

9. July 2008

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Moving the system folder in CodeIgniter

It’s the first real night of actual work on the app, and already I’ve run into my first gotcha! For security reasons I decided to move the /system folder - which contains everything needed to run an application on CodeIgniter apart from the index.php file - outside of the web root. This is easily accomplished by [...]

9. July 2008

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Project management for the one-man band

When it comes to managing a project on which you’re the sole writer, designer, developer, and tester - is a commercial project management solution really necessary? The answer, of course, is ‘yes’. Without a consistent workflow for identifying, prioritising, and managing all your tasks across multiple areas, it would be far too easy to get overwhelmed [...]