How to Create a Layout Manager with CodeIgniter: New Premium Tutorial

This Premium video, and companion article will teach you how to create a simple, yet powerful library to handle layouts in the popular CodeIgniter framework. The library you’ll create will allow you to maximize your efficiency, save time and code, modularize your views and even your Javascript and CSS files.

The basic functionality of this library will be very simple. We’ll take the contents of a view, render them with the appropriate data, then take the rendered content and assign it to a variable. Now, we’ll render the layout itself, and replace a part of the layout with the contents of this variable. Simple, but powerful enough.

The idea is to mimic the calls to $this->load->view(). When we call this method, we pass the name (and location) of our view, and then an array of data that will be accessible from the view. Here’s an example:

function method($url_param)
{
  $this->load->view('controller_views/method_view', array('url_param' => $url_param));
}

The above code will take the file system/application/views/controller_views/method_view.php, pass it the url_param variable, and then send it to the browser. Here’s where we come in. We will not send the content to the browser yet. Instead, we’ll send it to the layout, then to the browser. But how do we do that?

…Become a Premium member to follow along with this screencast/article and find out!

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