Defining the doctype
Setting the page title
Adding meta data
Adding CSS
Addming Javascript files

This saves alot of time getting a site up and running. Its also extremly handy for large sites as you can define your default meta data, css & javascript in a __constructor so its is inhereted by all pages on the site.

A few examples of WrapUp can be found after the jump.

Load the library, you’ll probably want to autoload this if you are using it on the whole site.

$this−>load−>library('wrapup');

The WrapUp library enables you to quickly get an HTML page up and running.

$this->wrapup->head();

The head() function returns the basic html head structure as a string.

There’s not a lot to it but from here you can easily customise your head page, set up defaults and overide/add elements for specific pages.

I normally create a MY_Controller which all my classes inherit from. Then all my default head elements, css links, js files are added to the wrapup library in the MY_Controller constructor.

// set doctype to transistional
$this->wrapup->set_doctype('t');
// add charset meta tag
$meta = array(
'http-equiv' =>'Content-type',
'content' => 'text/html;charset=UTF-8'
);
$this->wrapup->add_meta(meta);
// add default css stylesheet
$this->wrapup->add_css('style.css');
// add google jquery script
$this->wrapup->add_js('jquery.min.js');
// add a default page titles
$this->wrapup->set_title('My Page Title');

This sets up our default page head element. I find it saves me a lot of time if I ever need to change the default style sheet for instance or the doctype. I only have to change it in one place!

Another feature of WrapUp is managing inline javascript and CSS. I try not to include any inline CSS due to the dreaded FOUC but its useful for debugging. Using WrapUp to manage you javascript enables you to generate javascript programatically (include server side variables) and group all off your javascript and send it to the browser at the bottom of the page right before closing your body tags.

You can add inline javascript by calling the add_js_inline() WrapUp method.

$js = 'function say_hello(){alert("hello");}';
$this->wrapup->add_js_inline($js);

Inline code can then be returned in your view by calling inline() method

$this->wrapup->inline();

So that’s about it for an introduction to WrapUp, no doubt i’ll add/tweak it as I discover news needs. Checkout the full documentation in the code vault to see other methods like add_rss()

• Stores new notifications added by the application
• Returns all unread notices added by the application

Pretty Simple. Added to that it will also remember notices between page redirects. So if you add a notice and then reach some code that triggers a redirect the notice will be displayed on the next page.

The library is now in its second incarnation. My original version supported three types of notices

1. Success (Well done, something that was meant to happen has happened)
2. Message (Nothings gone wrong, nothings gone right. Just wanted to say a little something)
3. Error (Oh shit, what did you do? Now i’m gonna have to tidy up after you again!)

Each message would be returned as separate elements with a relevant class representing the type. This was pretty sufficient for most applications but there were times when I wanted to add more attributes (classes, titles, ids) or just needed another ‘type’.

So the new version uses the magic php method __call to provide an unlimited number of ‘types’ via the method $oi->add_{type}($string);

e.g.
$this->oi->add_message('Well Done');

or

$this->oi->add_reallylongandimpressivesupertype('Hello');

More examples and documentation available in the code section

Turns out the twitter part was easy, thanks to simonmaddox’s nice twitter CI library. I got a few whiffs of a url shortening CI library around the web, but it looks like the code was no longer available. Oh well, a good excuse to knock up a new library!

Shortie is a simple library that uses curl to generate short urls using a number of different services. At the moment I have added support for four services:

• tr.im
• tinyurl
• is.gd
• u.nu

Check out the user guide, which was created using an app-in-progress Dokument, for examples.

More about Dokument later…