It's very easy to end up with complicated, brittle views full of messy logic and presentation code that really should be somewhere else. In my book, The CodeIgniter Handbook - Volume One - Who Needs Ruby? I discuss a great technique for cleaning up your views.

This small library is a lightweight, tested solution for using presenters within PHP (and CodeIgniter apps). This library is tailored for CI, but works with any PHP application.

class Book_Presenter extends Presenter
{
	public function price()
	{
		return number_format($this->book->price, 2);
	}
}

$book = $this->db->where('id', 1)->get('books')->row();
$book = new Book_Presenter($book);

echo $book->title() . ' costs ' . $book->price();

Add it to your composer.json:

{
	"require": {
		"jamierumbelow/presenters": "*"
	}
}

Run composer update:

$ php composer.phar update

...and autoload:

require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

Create a new class with the suffix _Presenter. Book_presenter will create a $this->book variable, Game_Type_Presenter will create a $this->game_type variable.

Instantiate a new presenter object and pass through the raw object:

$book = $this->db->where('id', 1)->get('books')->row();
$book = new Book_Presenter($book);

You can then access the data inside the presenter:

class Book_Presenter extends Presenter
{
	public function title()
	{
		return $this->book->title . ' - ' . $this->book->subtitle;
	}
}

If you'd like to customise the object name, pass it through as the second parameter:

$book = new Book_Presenter($book, 'bookObject');

class Book_Presenter extends Presenter
{
	public function title()
	{
		return $this->bookObject->title . ' - ' . $this->bookObject->subtitle;
	}
}