Professional CodeIgniter

Chapter 5: Building a Shopping Cart

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Figure 5-9

Fixing the Header

The header portion of the site is currently maintained in the header view. From a design perspective,

there are a few design and usability problems with the items in that view. For example, the search widget

is too wide, and the links don ’ t particularly look like navigation items. They just look like a list of words.

In this section, you remedy these problems.

First, though, open the /system/application/views/header.php in your editor. The first thing you ’ re

going to do is wrap the entire contents of the file (except for the image) into a < div > tag with ID

globalnav. Inside that div, you ’ re going to put in a < ul > tag, and wrap each of your links in an < li >

tag. That goes for the search form as well!

Once every item in the navigation is in an < li > tag, you can reduce the width of the search field by

setting the size variable of the $data array to something like 15.

Finally, you can add a very simple bit of code to detect whether you ’ re on the home page by using

$this - > uri - > segment(). If you ’ re on the home page, don ’ t show a link to Home. If you ’ re not, then

show the visitor a link he can click to go Home.

Why are you suddenly using $this - > uri - > segment() when you were simply assigning incoming

segments to an argument in the controller? First of all, you ’ re working inside the view, not the

controller, and thus it makes sense to use this function in this context. Second of all, you ’ re looking at