Codeigniter Framework is one of the best PHP Framework around the world. Several people use this for different purpose. Application with Codeigniter is very fast in comparison to other framework. Good documentation, easy structure is main features.

During development some of us don’t know about some already build-in libraries which makes our development easy to easier. Today i will discuss about some of the libraries:

Message Library
one of the important library is this Message library. we need to show different types of message in our application. sometime we need to show success message after redirect to another page. Again we need to show error message on unsuccessful operations, warnings as well. i found this library very much useful in comparison to other existing libraries of codeigniter.

<?php if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

/**
 * Message:: a library for giving feedback to the user
 *
 * @author  Adam Jackett
 * @url http://www.darkhousemedia.com/
 * @version 2.1
 */

class CI_Message {

    var $CI;
    var $messages = array();
    var $wrapper = array('', '');

    function CI_Message($config){
        $this->CI =& get_instance();
        $this->CI->load->library('session');

        if($this->CI->session->flashdata('_messages')) $this->messages = $this->CI->session->flashdata('_messages');
        if(isset($config['wrapper'])) $this->wrapper = $config['wrapper'];
    }

    function set($message, $type, $flash=FALSE, $group=FALSE){
        if(!is_array($message)) $message = array($message);
        foreach($message as $msg){
            $obj = new stdClass();
            $obj->message = $msg;
            $obj->type = $type;
            $obj->flash = $flash;
            $obj->group = $group;
            $this->messages[] = $obj;
        }

        $flash_messages = array();
        foreach($this->messages as $msg){
            if($msg->flash) $flash_messages[] = $msg;
        }
        if(count($flash_messages)) $this->CI->session->set_flashdata('_messages', $flash_messages);
    }

    function get($type=FALSE, $group=FALSE){
        $output = array();
        if(count($this->messages)){
            foreach($this->messages as $msg){
                if($type !== FALSE){
                    $output[] = $msg->message;
                } else {
                    if(!isset($output[$msg->type])) $output[$msg->type] = array();
                    $output[$msg->type][] = $msg->message;
                }
            }
        }
        return $output;
    }

    function display($group=FALSE, $wrapper=FALSE){
        if(count($this->messages)){
            $output = $this->get(FALSE, $group);
            echo ($wrapper !== FALSE ? $wrapper[0] : $this->wrapper[0])."rn";
            foreach($output as $type => $messages){
                echo '<div class="message-'.$type.'">'."rn";
                foreach($messages as $msg){
                    echo '<p>'.$msg.'</p>'."rn";
                }
                echo '</div>'."rn";
            }
            echo ($wrapper !== FALSE ? $wrapper[1] : $this->wrapper[1])."rn";
        }
    }

}

How to Use?

1. Put this library to libraries folder
2. load this library to your application manually or using autoload.php.
3. syntax of setting message:

$this->message->set('YOUR_MESSAGE', 'MESSAGE_TYPE', 'REDIRECT_TRUE_OR_FALSE');

if you are about to show a message after redirection, write the following code:

$this->message->set('YOUR_MESSAGE', 'MESSAGE_TYPE', true);
redirect('/');

if you are about to show a message in the same page, write the following code:

$this->message->set('YOUR_MESSAGE', 'MESSAGE_TYPE', false);
$this->load->view('home.php',$data);

To show the message inside a view, just put the following code inside your view:

$this->message->display();

To get a closer look on this library follow the following link

http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Message/

Layout Library
Its very important to maintain layout mechanism in modern web application. To do so, there are lots of libraries. among those, this one is better and easy to implement and understand.

<?php
if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Layout
{

    var $obj;
    var $layout;

    function Layout($layout = "layout_main")
    {
        $this->obj =& get_instance();
        $this->layout = $layout;
    }

    function setLayout($layout)
    {
      $this->layout = $layout;
    }

    function view($view, $data=null, $return=false)
    {
        $loadedData = array();
        $loadedData['content_for_layout'] = $this->obj->load->view($view,$data,true);

        if($return)
        {
            $output = $this->obj->load->view($this->layout, $loadedData, true);
            return $output;
        }
        else
        {
            $this->obj->load->view($this->layout, $loadedData, false);
        }
    }
}
?>

You can have more details about this library at codeigniter forum link:

http://codeigniter.com/wiki/layout_library/

to be continued…