Yesterday Jeffrey Way, Editor of Nettuts+ did a video tutorial on Easy Authentication using CodeIgniter. As part of the tutorial he takes you through the process of building an authentication system with CodeIgniter and how to restrict access to certain parts of your website to only those who’ve logged in.

This Press Release is written by one of our community members: Adam Griffiths. If you’d like to contribute with a press release, please send an email to .

In the beginning
About two years ago I was a regular old teenager, writing boring (and seriously not fun) procedural code. There was a rave going on about Ruby on Rails and I wanted to get in on the action. But being the lazy teenager, I didn’t want to learn a new language, I simply wanted to see if there was anything that could help me develop faster, better apps in PHP. I ended up looking at quite a few PHP frameworks (and even tried to roll my own) - but as soon as I found CodeIgniter and started reading the user guide, I was hooked. Little did I know that two years later I would have written and published a book all before my 18th birthday.

Taking a lot from the community
For the next few months I built a lot of stuff using CodeIgniter, all of which were just-for-fun to help me learn CodeIgniter faster. All in all, CI helped me become a better developer overall; I had never heard of MVC before reading the user guide, had no idea what a singleton class was and the syntax helped me write pretty code. I had been given a lot by using CodeIgniter, and the community helped me immensely in my initial stages of working out how to be a ‘real’ developer and not just a kid who writes code in his bedroom. I had watched screencasts, read blog posts and forum posts and even read tweets about how awesome CodeIgniter is and how to do different things with it. I felt like I had to give something back.

The Authentication Library
The Authentication Library was the child of a web app I was creating. I needed to find a simple user authentication solution that did everything for me so I could focus on writing the web app. I went through three or four community created solutions and found them all to either be too hard to use or not include a feature I needed. So I wrote my own library and made it very simply to use. I ended up rewriting the whole thing about 6 months later and doing the seemingly impossible, I made it even easier to use. Literally so easy all you needed to do to get a full user authentication system up and running is to extend the class ‘Application’ instead of ‘Controller’ in your controllers and you’re away. The community seemed to be using my library in all sorts of applications and at the time it was my way of saying thanks to both Ellis Lab and all of the CodeIgniter community members. Because of the huge uptake and interest in the library, I kept releasing updates, new features and included community fixes to make it a much better library overall.

Programmers Voice
After about a year or so of CodeIgniter development I starting writing tutorials and putting them online at programmersvoice.com. Soon enough the site started to get fairly popular, by far the highest traffic website I had created. Eventually I recorded screencasts and tutorial series on how to write CMS’ and even how to roll your own PHP framework. This was another way I could give back to the CodeIgniter community. Unfortunately, it got to the point where I had run out of ideas for blog posts and eventually the posts died down to sweet nothing. The domain now redirects to my own website after staying dormant for so long. One day it might make a reappearance.

Deciding to write a book and how the community helped
After deciding to write a book, I needed to know what to put in it! I decided I wanted to write a fairly advanced book since the user guide and all the other CodeIgniter books have the basics covered. So I turned to the forums for help. I wrote a post titled CodeIgniter Book Questions. This forum post helped me decide to go after a publisher, simply because the amount of people who gave comments on what should be covered in the book and how many people said they would buy it. I drew up a Table of Contents and threw it out there for more thoughts. This forum thread became the driving force behind finding a publisher and signing a contract.

I looked around the internet for publishers that I knew would at least think about taking me and the book on. I ended up emailed Packt Publishing giving reasons as to why I would be a good writer (having written many tutorials for my CodeIgniter tutorial website, I’m no stranger to technical writing) and used the forum thread as proof that there was interest out there in the community for an advanced book. Since Packt had published a CodeIgniter book in the past I felt there was a good chance they’d take me seriously. They did. After a number of emails back and forth between me and my future Editor, I had a contract sent to me in the post and I had already starting writing Chapter 1.

I stuck to the table of contents I wrote for the forum post as much as I could and even ended up writing three more chapters than I had originally planned.

Wanting to write a book and actually writing one are two very different things
I had actually wanted to write a book for about a year before I made the forum post that kicked it all off. I think I underestimated the huge task that writing a book is but given the circumstances, I did rather well balancing my college work and writing the book. The largest piece of writing I had ever done before this book was a tutorial for Programmers Voice at just shy of 3,000 words, that’s the length of the shortest Chapter of the book, and there are 10 chapters, that largest chapter is shy of 8,000 words!! Overall the whole book tips the scale at 50,000 words. That’s a lot of words, I know this isn’t the longest book in history but it’s quite an achievement! It was a huge undertaking but throughout the process I kept thinking of the guys who wanted the book, and those who sent me messages on twitter and via email asking me about it, and kept plugging along.

Once the first draft had been sent in to the publisher there was an immense sense of relief that I had finished writing. Until about a week later I had half of the chapters back from the publisher with corrections and comments to be made and read through. Once this had all been done and I had sent off the final drafts to the publisher, all there was left to do was to go through the code with my Technical Editor. No thanks to Facebook there for changing their API half way through development, all the code just stopped working! We dealt with it and the code still works today, two months after being published; maybe Facebook don’t hate me after all.

When I had my copies through the post I was immensely excited. So much so that when the box came when I was at college, I made my mum bring me the box so I could open it and show the book off to all my friends; some of which didn’t believe I was actually writing a book! The whole process was thoroughly enjoyable and hugely rewarding, I’m glad I did it.

Final thoughts
If you are thinking about writing a book I would advise you to know as much as you can about the whole process of book writing before you start. I hadn’t a clue how anything worked in the publishing industry, so once I had my documents through and had to give dates for handing each chapter in, I was baffled. I didn’t know how long it would take me to write 3,000 words or 30 pages; especially since I had college as well. I ended up guessing most of the dates and I will admit here, a few of the chapters were written in a few days before the Monday hand in date. By knowing what you’re getting into before you get into it, you give yourself more chance to get comfortable with the writing processes and you let your mind focus on writing, rather than if you’re formatting things correctly.

The most important piece of advice I can give to any budding authors out there though is to always write when you are awake and refreshed, read everything over before submitting it to the publisher and if you’re not happy with a chapter, you have the power to change it. On numerous occasions I wasn’t happy with the chapters I was writing so politely asked the publisher for an extension to my deadline. I was always focussed on writing a quality book, and I’m glad my publisher let me do just that.

Chase your dreams. Life’s too short to be standing still.

So go ahead and check out my book, CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development and check out my website.