Web design is (or perhaps should be) all about good practices and web standards. In spite of that, it’s pretty amazing how many designers just learn by doing and do what works rather than what’s good. Here are a few tips I wish I had been told about from the start.

1. Include a color scheme in your stylesheets

That way, when you’re creating a border color for some random form element and you can’t remember exactly what shade of light blue you have been using, you don’t have to search through the CSS declarations until you find it. Here’s an example from yours truly, CapsizeDesigns.com:

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So you understand the basics of MVC. You get the Active Record and all that craziness. You have CI up and running, maybe even with some basic controllers and views. You’re on your way. At this point, it’s the details that start to get confusing. Where do assets (CSS, JS, images, etc.) go? How do I know if this piece of code belongs in a model or a library (or a helper)? How can I change the way URLs are displayed? If this sounds like you, you’re in the right place my friend.

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One of the major reasons why PHP frameworks benefit us has to do with the inexperienced (or even average) developer’s lack of security knowledge. PHP (especially database driven PHP) is riddled with loopholes and opportunities to a malicious user to get the best of you, unless you know what you’re doing.

Luckily, CodeIgniter handles a lot of these concerns for you, and gives you the tools to handle the rest. In this section of the CI tutorial, we’ll take a look at many common security threats, including how CI handles them and what you need to do to make sure your CI driven web apps aren’t being threatened by them.

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