This might sound slightly “out there” at first. Basically I’m building a small back-end in CodeIgniter that I would like to easily be able to roll out to multiple projects in the future. At the moment it’s a collection of controllers, helpers, extended core classes, views and an assets folder. If I want to keep this easy for me to redistribute then I’d like to try and keep the number of individual files down.
Views, controllers and models are obviously best to retain as separate files.
But I’m also extending quite a few of CI’s core classes with my own: CI_Controller, CI_Form_validation and CI_Input. With possibly more to follow.
Is there a way I can combine these 3 into a single file?
Obviously not having them in the application/core directory will break the MY_ prefix autoloading. It would also be brilliant if I could store my custom helper functions in the same file as well. This allows me to preserve any application-specific core classes in application/core in the traditional MY_ prefix format, whilst being able to rollout updates to my core classes easily.
I’m currently using Phil’s Improved Native Autoloader in config.php (see here… http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/forums/viewthread/218099/#1006583) to load my extended core classes without using the MY_ prefix so I can give them more recogniseable and logical names for easier redistribution.
This suggests to me that config.php is processed early enough in initiation that I might be able to just do a cheeky require('AdminCoreClasses.php').
As that’s basically what the native autoloader does but looks at the current class name to specify which file to load. I would just be hard-coding a single file, which contains all my extended core classes in one.
Is there a better way to do this?
At the moment I already just zip my “module” up once I’ve finished making any changes. I do not include the CI system.
So extracting from the zip does dump everything into the right sub directories.
I would like to leave the core files untouched as well, for easy upgrading. I actually have different names for my modified classes so I don’t use the MY_ prefix. This allows me to use the MY_ prefix for other modified classes that are nothing to do with my back-end module and on an application-specific basis.
I am now thinking that I’ll just forget this and carry on the way I’m currently doing it. I don’t want to mess around with the way CI is structured as my primary aim is to keep it easy to upgrade the framework.