Professional CodeIgniter

Chapter 4: Creating the Main Web Site

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What about the Shopping Cart?

You ’ ve created a great deal of functionality in just a few hours. You have a working home page, category

and subcategory pages, product detail pages, and a rudimentary search engine. You have specialized

model functions to retrieve the data that you need, including navigation, featured products, and related

products. Your main view, called template , is smart enough to load all the other subviews it needs and

can accept a dynamically set view name from the controller.

What ’ s left? Well, there isn ’ t a real shopping cart on the site. There ’ s no way for the site visitor to add a

product to the shopping cart or to view the contents of that shopping cart. In Chapter 5 , you create this

shopping cart system using CodeIgniter sessions and the help of a new model that is dedicated to

the shopping cart data in those sessions.

At this point in the project, you deserve a break. You ’ ve completed more with CodeIgniter in just a few

hours than most other PHP developers could complete in several weeks. Your code is minimal, easy to

understand, and easy to update. It ’ s time to look at the sprint backlog to see what kind of progress

you ’ ve made.

Revisiting the Sprint Backlog

At the end of Chapter 2 , you created an initial sprint backlog. As you look over it now, you realize that

you ’ ve made progress on more than half the items on that list.

Here ’ s the list again:

1. Install and configure CodeIgniter on a development server. DONE.


2. Create the initial tables for products and categories. DONE.


3. Build a model for products, with functions for listing all products by category, listing product
   details for any given product, and listing other products that belong to the same group as a
   product. DONE.


4. Build a model for categories, with functions for listing all categories as a tree, listing
   subcategories for a category, and listing category details. The products model already contains a
   function that allows you to list all products in a category. DONE.


5. Create a controller for all visible pages, with functions for the home page, About Us, Contact Us,
   Search Results, Product Detail, Shopping Cart, and Category view. 80 percent DONE (need
   shopping cart).


6. Create special controller functions for running the search and adding items to a Shopping Cart
   cookie. 50 percent DONE.


7. Create other Shopping Cart functions that allow you to display everything in a Shopping Cart,
   recalculate prices with Ajax, and delete line items from a Shopping Cart.


8. Create all the views needed to display web pages. This will more than likely involve a master
   template with includes as needed to minimize your work later on.

Chapter 5 is where you dig into the Shopping Cart details. For now, take a well - deserved break!