CI-HeadLink (Sibling of CI-HeadScript)

History

Without history, not every thing makes sense...

Little bit about me...

My history with PHP is considerably long. I wrote my first script app just over 6 years ago. I even developed my own mini CodeIgniter (MVC) to accelarate my web development work. But I some how fell in love with Zend Framework 2 for the degree of flexibility (except shared hosting) it provided. A week ago I decided to get my website using CodeIgniter, it was easy but less fully equiped.

Some thing Zend has but don't seem to be with CI

In Zend Framework, I use the ViewHelperManager taken from the ServiceLocater to append CSS/JS in the controller. Its kind of my way of doing it. But I found that there was no such way to handle it in CI, but some thing similar is remakably simple to implent and here is CI-HeadLink.

What is HeadScript

HeadLink is a script loading library for code igniter inspired by the functionality found in Zend Framework 2. I tried to find similar functionality and many forum posts seem to be saying 'include it in the view'.

Not happy about the advice, here comes a free simple script loading library for CodeIgniter. Useage is simple, load the library, append scripts and echo out the html generated.

Installation and Usage

Using HeadScript is simple, here is an example:

1. First Copy Head_link.php to your libraries directory. The file would be under the libraries directory in this repo.
2. Then load the library in the controller
3. Then append files to the library
4. At the view, echo the html output... Thats it

	// File - MyController.php
	// Load Library, many ways to do so...
	public function index(){
		$this->load->library('head_link');
		
		$this->head_link->append('css-1.css');
		$this->head_link->append('css-2.css');
		
		// Or simply chain it
		$this->head_link->append('css-1.css')->append('css-2.css');
		
		// Rest of your code for the controller
	}

Then in the view...

	<!-- Your HTML Code before scripts -->
	
	<?php echo $this->head_link->getHtml(); ?>
	
	<!-- Your html code after scripts -->

I don't think this needs a user guide, but for completeness sake I will produce one in due time. It would be able to obtained via the GitHub repo and would be possibly hosted in my website JDeen.com once I finish with it!