CodeIgniter view not loading and white screen displayed instead - php

Question

I've been debugging this piece of code for hours now without success. All I'm trying to do is get a view to load. Instead of it loading, I get a white screen and no error messages anywhere.
Here's the code from the controller:
<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
class Welcome extends CI_Controller {
/**
* Index Page for this controller.
*
* Maps to the following URL
* http://example.com/index.php/welcome
* - or -
* http://example.com/index.php/welcome/index
* - or -
* Since this controller is set as the default controller in
* config/routes.php, it's displayed at http://example.com/
*
* So any other public methods not prefixed with an underscore will
* map to /index.php/welcome/<method_name>
* #see http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/urls.html
*/
public function index()
{
$this->load->view('welcome_message');
}
//echo "we made it to the function";
public function login_form()
{
$this->load->view('login_form');
}
public function login_submit()
{
print_r( $_POST );
$this->load->model('Usermodel', 'users');
$match = $this->users->authenticate_user( $_POST['email'], $_POST['password'] );
if( $match )
{
echo "User exists in database!";
}
else
{
echo "Email or password is wrong, bretheren!";
}
}
}
The important part is the "function login_form". Here is the code for that view:
<form action="<?php base_url() ?>welcome/login_submit" method="post">
<label>
email:
<input id="email" name="email" />
</label>
<label>
password:
<input type="password" id="password" name="password" />
</label>
<input type="submit" value="Log me in!" />
</form>
This is the link I'm using in my browser to get to the page:
localhost/intranet/index.php/welcome/login_form
The code all looks fine to me and I just can't seem to figure out where the program is breaking. Does anybody have any ideas?
EDIT: I took out the shorthand but I have the same problem.

Answer 1

1) You're missing an echo...
<?php echo base_url() ?>
2) To use base_url(), you also need to load the URL Helper someplace.
https://www.codeigniter.com/user_guide/helpers/url_helper.html
3) I strongly recommend reading the entire documentation, including the simple demos & tutorials, before starting a CodeIgniter project...
https://www.codeigniter.com/user_guide/
4) Although you can use PHP short-tags (as per your server config), they're not recommended.
https://www.codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/styleguide.html#short-open-tags

Answer 2

You have to either enable the URL Helper in your configuration, or in the controller if you want to use the base_url() function:
$this->load->helper('URL');
<form action="<?php base_url() ?>welcome/login_submit" method="post">
should be
<form action="<?php echo base_url() ?>welcome/login_submit" method="post">
OR Shorthand if you configure it properly:
<form action="<?=base_url() ?>welcome/login_submit" method="post">
Noiticed the post about not being able to use shorthand with CodeIgniter and yes you can, I've just completed a project where we used shorthand. It's just how you configure your php.ini
<?= is just short for <?php echo

Answer 3

you are using codeigniter so why not use it's all functionality. you can create form in codeigniter like this
So you no need to use base_url or so and it is the right method to use in codeigniter.
<?php echo form_open("welcome/login_submit",array('method'=>'post')); ?>
<label>
email:
<?php echo form_input(array('name'=>'email','id'=>'email')); ?>
</label>
<label>
password:
<?php echo form_password(array('name'=>'password','id'=>'password')); ?>
</label>
<?php
echo form_button(array('type'=>'submit','value'=>'Log me in!'));
echo form_close(); ?>