Question

I have my main site kansasoutlawwrestling.com which will be using Codeigniter, and then I am also creating a CMS for myself that is a separate entity which will be located at kansasoutlawwrestling.com/kowmanager.

My CMS will use different CSS, javascript, and image files, so I’m wondering if I should just have two different installs of CI. I tried looking at PyroCMS, but there’s way too many folders and I was having a problem understanding its file structure. What is the proper set up for this is?

Answer 1

The basic structure of Codeigniter is that you have 2 folders and 1 file in your root folder:

root/application/
root/system/
root/index.php

Now, obviously, you might have many more files and folders in there as well, but these are the basics upon which every Codeigniter app runs.

What do each of these do? To begin with, every page request starts at index.php. This page set’s up some configurations and some constants, and then hands over the reigns to Codeigniter.

Where is “Codeigniter” located? That would be the system folder. This folder should never be touched, by you or anyone else. Everything pertaining to your app is stored within the application folder. This includes all your configurations, your controllers, your models, your views, even your library extensions (although you could store other stuff outside this folder, like images/css/js/fonts etc.).

So, the correct way to set up shop would be:

root/application/
root/system/
root/index.php

root/kowmanager/application
root/kowmanager/index.php

But, you have to inform your kowmanager’s index.php that the system folder is not located in the same directory. So, within the index.php (inside of kowmanager), at around line 25, you should see this:

$system_path = "system";

Simply change it to:

$system_path = "../system";

and you’re done.

Now both your apps (your main site and you CMS) will be sharing the same Codeigniter base. When the time comes to update CI, you’ll do that once within the main system folder…