If you're taking over an existing project you will likely need to know what exact version of CodeIgniter that you're using. This will help you determine which user guide to view, what features you can expect to have, and more. This article will take a look at a couple of different methods.

Do you have access to the command line?

If you can get to the command line for the project then the first thing you can try is to see what version of CodeIgniter 4 you might be running. At this point, version 4 has been out for…

Sometimes you just need to drop to a command line and explore your application interactively. A REPL will allow you to do just that by providing an interactive cli that knows about your application.

What is a REPL?

A REPL is basically a console for your application. It stands for Read - Eval - Print loop, meaning that it takes the commands you give it, evaluates the code, and outputs the result. This means that most anything that you can do in your application you can explore in the REPL.

What is it good for?

I find these…

Hey all - I just hit a milestone in the Hot Reloading feature I'm working on for CodeIgniter 4.4 - and it actually works now!

Wanted to share my excitement with a quick demo for you!

Also trying out a new mic as I get ready to record the first few videos of the Shield course very soon. Turns out it records the keyboard way too loud! Have to figure that out... Any tips appreciated :)

Why should Javascript developers have all of the fun?

I've got two personal projects for CI on my semi-immediate todo list, both geared toward making out lives a bit easier:

• better dynamic locale handling via the URI
• hot reloading

I started in on the locale handling a couple of weeks ago but then got concerned it was going to be a BC break. Still have to look into that one further. In the meantime, though, I've just about got Hot Reloading working in CI.

What is Hot Reloading?

If you don't work with Javascript frameworks much, you might…

In the second Vlog around building the new blog/LMS site I touch on two main topics:

1. Entity Relationships and how to easily work with them without needing an ORM.

2. Controlled Cells and HTMX and how they work together to build the comments section of the posts.

I'm curious - are you checking out HTMX yet? If so, what do you think? I'm really digging it so far and feel that I haven't tapped into anything close to its full power, yet, even though it seems like such a simple concept of a library.

I apologize for not getting the next vlog out - I've been completely absorbed working on the site itself. I'm at a good pausing point now, though, so I'll get the next vlog out in the next few days. Depends on how the snow currently coming down affects free time for the next couple of days.

I don't know that I'll be able to cover it all in a single vlog entry, but we'll see. IIRC, the following has happened since the first video:

• category system
• tags system
• wordpress importer
• Patreon logins integrated through Shield…

Shield was started over Christmas break last year, IIRC. I guess it is only fitting that I spent this break working on it some more. Well, I mostly tried to relax and enjoy family time (and too much time playing games). But I also managed to take a couple of nights and knock out one of the frequent questions we've gotten about Shield as developers like yourself start digging into it:

"What does this active field actually do?"

The unfortunate response was, "Not a whole lot".

That's about to be fixed, though. I just submitted a pull request that adds…

As promised, here's the first video in the new vlog where I go behind-the-scenes on how I'm building the new blog/LMS site. I go over things like:

• how it's organized

• how I think about a models role

• using HTMX for faster and smoother content loading and page switching.

• why I like TailwindCSS

• and more....

This first episode has been made public as a teaser/trailer to the series, but all future ones will be for patrons only.

Please let me know if you have any questions about anything I've discussed in this video and I'll…