Open-sourced my work projects

One of the awesome things about my last job is that I got to open source my work. More companies should do this! Among the benefits of open-sourcing work is it presents evidence of previous work and experience for the employee and for the employer it means projects get exposure and contributions from outside.

My main project is a SOP/experiment definition management system. It was written in PHP using the CodeIgniter framework with a little Zend Framework and the data is stored in a MySQL database. I'm close to finishing the paper for the project. Check out the code in the meantime: https://github.com/mpi2/impress

For the main project I created an OWL Ontology using a combination of Protégé and the Java OWLAPI to generate ontology classes and individuals from the items in the database. For those of you who want to figure out how to use the OWLAPI to build ontologies I am sure the code will help you figure it out: https://github.com/mpi2/impress_owl

Also, I'd like to point out another project I wrote which is mappings of core XML datatypes into PHP classes (with validation checking): https://github.com/mpi2/xmldatatype.

And a reminder to a previously mentioned project, PhpObo, which is a OBO file format parser and builder written in PHP: https://github.com/mpi2/PhpObo

Loading CSS, JS and images from CodeIgniter

Just a quick tip for newbs (me included). If you're having trouble loading css, js or image files into your views/templates in CodeIgniter and you do a Google search to find the solution, you'll find many websites telling you to use the base_url() function. This didn't work for me!

The reason why it didn't work was because I hadn't loaded the url helper class... DUH! Stick this in the constructor of your controller or autoload it in your autoload.php configuration file.

$this->load->helper('url');

Now you can use the base_url() function to get the url path from where to look for those files, e.g.:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo base_url(); ?>styles/main.css" type="text/css">

This will load a css file called main.css from a folder called styles which is just under the base url folder codeigniter. On my PC it will find the file from: C:\wamp\www\codeigniter\styles\main.css

I reckon the creators of CodeIgniter should have added a constant through which to refer to the base_url and similar paths, or at least make the url class have static functions so url::base_url() can be called instead of base_url() which could be confused for a normal PHP function.