Creating a referral link on CodeIgniter - php

Question

I have a membership site where people can sign up for an account using their name, phone number and password of choice. The information entered during registration is stored in a MySQL database table called users. The primary key in the users table is the phone number. During sign up, the user has the option to type the phone number of his referrer into the referrer field. have all these set up and working fine, but I want to enhance the site some more, by:
Creating a unique referral link for users which will have their phone number appended to their link. I want to track which user referred others to my site so I can reward them.
When they share this link, and people click on it, it will take them to the registration page (register.php). On that page he phone number of the referrer will be set (and locked) in the referrer field.
I did some digging on the internet and found this code on github:
<?php
//check for referal links
function referal()
{
$CI =& get_instance();
$cookie_value_set = $CI->input->cookie('_tm_ref', TRUE) ? $CI->input->cookie('_tm_ref', TRUE) : '';
if ($CI->input->get('ref', TRUE) AND $cookie_value_set == '') {
// referred user so set cookie to ref=username
$cookie = array(
'name' => 'ref',
'value' => $CI->input->get('ref', TRUE),
'expire' => '7776000',
);
$CI->input->set_cookie($cookie);
return TRUE;
}elseif ($cookie_value_set == '') {
$cookie = array(
'name' => 'ref',
'value' => 'sso',
'expire' => '15552000',
);
$CI->input->set_cookie($cookie);
return TRUE;
}elseif ($cookie_value_set != '') {
//already referred so ignore
return TRUE;
}else{
return TRUE;
}
}
//end of hooks file
?>
The owner of the gist only mentioned saving the file as referral.php inside the hook folder. This is not helping me with what I want to achieve, I don't know how to use the code:
1. How do I pass the referrer field to the variable username from the users table?
2. How do I load the hook file to view (register.php)?
3. How and where do I call the hook file?
So can anybody give me an insight?

Answer 1

Well you are new to CodeIgniter and php. This will help you to get start with codeIgniter. Start coding with CodeIgniter using PhpStorm on Ubuntu 16.04 Merge Bootstrap to your current codeIgniter project in PhpStorm on ubuntu 16.04. Even these says about ubuntu os, it can use in other os as well. I think it's better to use id otherthan phone number for the primary key and make phone number as unique. It is not good to put phone number to the url. Because it is something personal for a user. You can use the id to the url. You can add it by as QueryString. To track users who use your site, you can add Google search console and Google analytic.