CodeIgniter – Bonfire Series – Introduction

I haven’t been blogging lately as much as I used to, this is because I have
been contributing to and learning how to use a new Open Source Project for
CodeIgniter, it’s basically
a prebuilt Admin panel for anything. No this is not another CMS, Blog, etc,
though it can be used for such. Bonfire is a basic starting point for
your web application based on CodeIgniter
and provides you with all the little detail’s that most programmer’s don’t
have time to implement into there software. Such as Secure User Permission’s,
Front End Controller, Auth Controller and a Admin Controller, Database
Migration’s, Log’s, Activities, and even a Module Builder that can even take
your pre-made database table and produce the basic Module code from it, or it
can create the database table based on your needs. Bonfire is already setup
for HMVC CodeIgniter, and has a great community. Currently the latest version
as of this article is .5RC with a very near future Stable Release coming soon.

One Thing I have found that CodeIgniter has been lacking is a Pre-made
Admin Panel and Bonfire fit’s the bill very nicely, I have created 10
different website’s using it and have released
a few modules for it on Github.

One of the thing’s that really drew me into the Bonfire community was it’s excellent Forums and the fact that it is very well documented, Offer’s a Excellent Template Library, plus Assets
management and many other thing’s that a base project need’s to start with. I personally love Open Source project’s and CodeIgniter has always been my PHP Framework of choice due to the
community and documentation on it, so I naturally I moved to the Bonfire community when I found it. Since Bonfire is a new Project, there are a lack of tutorials out for it, so I’m hoping
to release some of the ones I created and help the community out on understanding how to use Bonfire and how to create excellent website’s with it.

This post is mainly a Introduction to Bonfire itself, I will be explaining How to make Templates, Modules, using Modules as View Partials, AJAX Pub/Sub’s, etc, as well as releasing alot of
the module’s I have already created and use everyday. I find the best part of using Bonfire and HMVC in general is that once I build a module, I can copy it from one Website into another
run the database migration’s and change the view if needed and I’m done, no need to re-code things to fit into another web-site, the code is Portable and Re-usable which for Free-lancers
or Business owner’s that means every Module you make is basically a asset that once you create it, you can re-use it over and over again without to much work behind it, which any good
business owner knows once you have your own Asset’s library built up like that you make more money free-lancing or developing.

I hope this article was a good primer on what’s to come, You can find Bonfire or on Github, and of course you can find my module’s
that I have released on Github also.