forum uri http://codeigniter.com/forums/viewthread/73469/

I think it needs to be explained in user guide.

Any suggestions for wording?  To me this is just understanding OOP with PHP so I’d like to hear some suggestions from those who ran into this problem and didn’t grasp it right away.  Something that won’t go over the heads of the people who would benefit from this extra documentation, but not so dumbed down that the user just follows the steps without knowing why, thinking it was something weird with CI.

The user guide led me to believe that I could override and extend functionality of the core class just by creating MY_Controller, but in actual fact I need to do this AND then make sure the controllers I’ve written extend MY_Controller.

This is in contrast to something like MY_Output, or any of the helpers - I can create MY_html_helper add some functions, and they will automatically become available without having to alter anything in any other files. On the other hand if I extend Controller, I will need to make sure my controllers inherit from MY_Controller.

I think just noting that simply extending Controller won’t work, and you will need to specifically extend MY_Controller in all your site controllers.

Done.