Professional CodeIgniter

Chapter 4: Creating the Main Web Site

81

The reason for these two errors is simple. You haven ’ t established a $data[ ’ main ’ ] variable in your

controller, and the view is expecting some kind of value so it can load an appropriate subview in that

space. Why is it called $data[ ’ main ’ ]? It ’ s called that because it will contain the “ main ” content for any

given page, be it a Contact Us form, a home page listing, or a product page. Using a dynamic variable

like this allows you to reuse templates.

The rest of this chapter focuses on how to create the content for this important variable. To do that, you

will need to refer to the initial sketches created with Claudia. Starting with the next section of this

chapter, you ’ re going to be doing just that, working through each page of the application.

By the end of the chapter, you should know most of what you need to know to create an MVC web site.

The last part, building the actual Shopping Cart application, is left for Chapter 5 , only because the level

of detail involved requires further attention.

Displaying the Home Page

So now you know what you have to do — populate the main variable in the template view. Before doing

this, it ’ s a good idea to look at the mockup you worked on with Claudia. As a reminder, it ’ s shown in

Figure 4 - 3.

Figure 4 - 3

What Claudia wants on the home page is a main featured product with three other featured products to

the right, each from a different category. The main featured product includes a large image and a short

description, while the three others consist of a small thumbnail image and a title (no description). Both

groups have appropriate links that allow the visitor to buy now or see more detail.

At the moment, you could spend a lot of time on display or look and feel issues, but you ’ re going to take

the MVC approach and work on the model first. Why? Because you need to have some data to work

with first, and the model is where you do that.