Chassis

Requirements

uses gulp.js for sass compilation, image optimization, and js concatenation/uglifying Gulp.js
Node is required to get Gulp up and running.

Installation

If you have node.js installed already, skip to step 2. Otherwise, I recommend you install Homebrew. Once homebrew is installed, run:
```
brew install node
```
Gulp needs to be installed globally. Note: if it complains about permissions, run it with sudo.
```
npm install -g gulp
```
In the project root type npm install. This should install all the necessary components.
run composer install to get all the php side set up
run gulp to start watching!
you can use artisan to serve this up on localhost and get to work with
```
php artisan serve
```
otherwise, continue to step 7 to get a vagrant vm going.
OPTIONAL - A Vagrantfile has been provided with a provision script. After Vagrant and Virtualbox have been installed, run:
```
vagrant up
```
(if this throws errors, try updating Virtualbox.) This will serve the site up on http://192.168.5.5

For simplicity I am running this on a private network, that was, if I want to visit http://sitename.dev instead, all I have to do is add an entry to /etc/hosts, like 192.168.5.5 sitename.dev Here's a one liner to accomplish that:
```
echo "192.168.5.5 sitename.dev" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
```
Obviously change sitename.dev to whatever you want to use.

Customizations

app/helpers.php

This is a growing list of unsorted little functions that are useful. At some point if this grows beyond just a few helpful functions I will probably namespace this to Harlo\helpers and move it out to a Package. Right now its just a handful of functions like get_gravatar($email) which takes an email, md5s it, and returns a url for the gravatar image of that email.

app/composers.php

View Composers are amazing. They allow us to package data and bind it to views when they are called. So if I want to have a list of pages, I can simply include an array called pages with the view itself, and keep my controller clean.

Laravel does not provide a default place for these, and some people keep them in routes, but I felt it would keep things simple if I moved them all out to their own place. If these grow to be too much to handle, I might also move some of it out to a namespace and use this file as a router to the namespace, (something like View::composer('layouts.inc.cms-header', 'Harlo\Composers\CMSHeaderComposer.php');

Harlo namespace.

in composer.json I am PSR-0 loading app/Harlo, which will contain all classes in the Harlo namespace. At the moment, I am just using this to abstract the user, page, and setting creation tasks from my controller. Eventually, the page creator will be a fairly cumbersome thing, so I would like to move it out to a package and create a simple interface for it.

app/Harlo/Page contains Creator.php and Updater.php, which handle the creation and updating of pages. This pattern is repeated in app/Harlo/Setting and app/Harlo/User. Eventually, I would like to create a generic creation and updating class, as well as a generic set of success and fail methods to call in order to reduce redundancy.

Roadmap

All emails for resets, etc need to use Ink
User management area. Add, remove, update users.
Settings management area. Here we set sitewide variables (facebook url, etc)
Need to namespace all the things.
Installation bash script?
Move helpers out to namespace
Make this more SOLID.

jgable/chassis