Active Record can be a very useful tool in your developer arsenal. It allows you to code faster and helps ensure your queries execute without security issues.

MVC has defiantly changed the way applications are written over the past few years. It is more organized and developer-friendly, but it comes with a bit of a learning curve. I will cover what models are and how I use them to speed up my application development.

Mozenda is a very powerful data scraping service. If you have ever found yourself writing scripts or manually copying and pasting data from one website to another then mozenda is for you. They have a very nice, full featured REST API which will be the focus of this article.

Envato recently released an API for thier various Marketplaces. I have taken the various methods of interacting with this data and compiled it into one, easy to use codeigniter library. It can also be used as a standalone php class if you wish. The class is currently PHP5 and requires you have json_encode, json_decode, and curl functions available.