Hey all, doing a bit of development with CodeIgniter and I’ve noticed that the official docs are friendly and very useful, but far from comprehensive and not very quick, as far as getting information. Is there a class reference other than the “Quick Reference” (which isn’t all that great, doesn’t show arguments, etc)?
I think “comprehensive” is the term that best covers the user guide. Without the NOT. Agree about the benefits of a short summary. If you are using BBEdit, I compiled the entire API into clippings with the arguments from the user guide as placeholders. It makes for a good reference in your application menu. It’s in the CI wiki.
Hello
For just reading and wandering I’m using pages generated by Doxygen.
For jEdit “jumping to” i use Tags plugin (with generated tags with ctags program). Just install Tags plugin and read help for this.
“the user_guide was more than adequate for letting you know what does what”
user_guide is more than “not good enough” when your projects are complicated more than “blog site in 15 minutes”
Many of useful parameters are omited in user_guide. Some useful functions too.
There are really tons of things that the user manual does not document - just a list of all methods and properties would be useful. It’s not as core as the other stuff, but I don’t understand why there isn’t any online documentation like that, since it would take very little time to generate.
I’m always interested in making the docs better. If you find any undocumented functions, please feel free to simply contact me directly. I’ll get them in there right away. Great documentation is a high priority for me, and EllisLab, and for CodeIgniter.
tmcw: could you fire off a few quick examples of some of the stuff not documented?
For one, I need to know what models are loaded at all times (since my project involved some odd dynamic loading.) this is in $this->load->_ci_models; and it would be nice if the rest of the _variables were documented…
I do see your point, and I’m not meaning to “argue”, as you’re clearly right that there is some room for improvement, but the third parameter of view is documented. http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/loader.html
Site url is documented here, and is also available in the url helper as base_url().
Most private functions (ie: those that start with an underscore) aren’t documented, and like you, I think it would be useful if these were documented. For my part, I will commit to adding these into the docs as they come up and I have time. If you wanted to save me time by taking a first stab at documenting some of these, that would tremendously accelerate things.
Thanks for your interest tmcw! I greatly appreciate what you’re trying to accomplish here.
Yeah, I’ve noticed there are a few thing - albeit documented - could use some replication. Namely, the third parameter within the view method (it’s the one I always go looking for).
You’d expect the Views page to say something about it, but it fails to even mentions it’s existence. The Loader class is where you have to go to find it, which is logical (it’s part of the Loader class) - but it could help greatly, and minimize some questions on here, if it where mentioned in both locations.
Agreed. If you ever feel that the docs could use some clarification, you can always offer me a note on that page. I’m not trying to “pawn off the work”. My goal is to empower you!
Another suggestion: could there be a list of all the parts of CodeIgniter that function differently (or not at all) under PHP4 vs. PHP5? I just transferred a site over from Dreamhost to a batshit-insane locked-down school server and it’s a mystery why various things didn’t work. For one thing, renaming models, as in
It’s so slow to read through the user guide, where if you go search javadoc or something, you can see every single function, their visibility, parameters, return types, descriptions, examples, etc…
There should be something similar done for CodeIgniter. The user guide is great if you’re looking to read words, but it’s ultimately slower.
PS: I know this thread is old, but I figured it’s worth reviving.
