Contents

• Part 1: Installation
• Part 2: Orientation
• Part 3: Installing External Libraries
• Part 4: Managing Databases

I’ve used CodeIgniter for many years, but I have always, I confess, proceeded knowing just enough to get by. So forgive me if my approach seems a little clunky. I have never, for example, used CodeIgniter’s routes. I like my web application files nicely categorised into Model, View, Controller, Library and, if absolutely necessary, Helper.

Controllers

So for now, I want to carry on using Controllers, if that’s okay with you. Controllers are stored under application/controllers. Sound familiar?

Here’s a sample controller:

<?php

// application/controllers/news.php
class News_Controller extends Base_Controller {

	public function action_index() {
		echo "News index page.";
	}

	public function action_item($item) {
		echo "News item $item.";
	}

}
?>

In CodeIgniter, that’s all you would have needed to do, due to automatic routing. In Laravel, you need also to add the following to application/routes.php:

Route::controller('news');

To view these pages, you just visit yourdomain/news (/index is implied) and yourdomain/news/item/x (where x will probably refer to a specific news item, possibly by data id).

Note the naming of the functions – action_item, etc. The part after the underscore represents a “method” or page of your web site. Laravel’s routing magic makes sure you get the correct function. If you’re creating a RESTful API, you can use additional function names beginning get_, post_, etc. Check the Laravel documentation for more.

Views

Views are pretty straightforward and similar to CodeIgniter. Place them in application/views. Extending the example above, our controller could now look like this:

<?php

// application/controllers/new.php
class News_Controller extends Base_Controller {

	public function action_index() {
		echo "News index page.";
	}

	public function action_item($id) {
		$data = array('id' => $id);
		return View::make('results', $data);
	}

}

?>

Note that data can also be passed through to a view like this:

	public function action_item($id) {
		return View::make('item', $data)
		    ->with('id' => $id);
	}

And then your view (application/views/item.php) could be like this:

<h1>News flash</h1>
<p>This is news item <?php echo $id; ?>.</p>

Obviously your real views will be more syntactically complete.

Models

Models are created under application/models. Unlike CodeIgniter, Laravel comes with its own object relational mapper. In case you’ve not encountered the concept before, an ORM gives you a convenient way of dealing with database tables as objects, rather than merely thinking in terms of SQL queries. CodeIgniter has plenty of ORMs, by the way, it just doesn’t ship with one as standard.

Laravel’s built-in ORM is called “Eloquent”. If you choose to use it (there are others available), when creating a model, you extend the Eloquent class. Eloquent makes some assumptions:

• Each table contains a primary key called id.
• Each Eloquent model is named in the singular, while the corresponding table is named in the plural. E.g. table name “newsItems”; Eloquent model name “newsItem”.

You can override this behaviour if you like, it just makes things a bit more convenient in many cases.

Example model application/models/newsItem.php:

<?php
class NewsItem extends Eloquent {

}

(You can omit the closing ?> tag.)

Because the Eloquent class already contains a lot of methods, you do not necessarily need to do more than this. In your controllers, you could for example now do this:

$items = NewsItem::all();

foreach ($items as $item) {
  // Do stuff here
}

This is barely scratching the surface. Head on over to the official Laravel documentation for much more on all this.

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