PHP MVC Lite

Overview

A simple and light MVC framework with a simple structure inspired by Kohana Framework.

The main objectives of this framework are to:

Remove the need to explicitly define routes & urls
Provide some base classes required for any small project
An easy to use object oriented structure and API
Simple database abstraction

Installation

Clone the repo
Create a new virtualhost on you dev box with the base URL pointing to to php-mvc-lite/public
Go to your new URL
See what's happening in app/classes/controller/demo.php

Routes

The URL format of any route follows this pattern:

URL Format: http://domain.com/////

Controller

The controllers sit in the app/classes/controller directory. The conventions for controller classes are:

All controller classes must be derived from the base class Controller
Always prepend with 'Controller_'
Use Underscore as directory separator for example:
- Class Controller_Admin_Controlpanel would be in the directory app/classes/controller/admin/controlpanel.php
- Class Controller_Demo would be in directory app/classes/controller/demo.php
The directory structure, naming structure and inheritance structure should all match. e.g:
- Controller_Admin_Controlpanel extends Controller_Admin which extends Controller
To access the controller in the URL use hyphens to separate directories for example:
- URL http://domain.com/admin-controlpanel will use Controller_Admin_Controlpanel
- URL http://domain.com/contact will use Controller_Contact

Actions

All action methods within controllers must be prepended with 'action_', and also follow the similar naming conventions as controllers. index as the default action if none is specified

To access the method action_process within the class Controller_Shop_Order you would use http://domain.com/shop-order/process
All action methods must be public

Views

Views sit in the app/views directory and are referenced by their absolute path within the views directory. You don't need to write the .php file extension in the path parameter, so an example of a view called main.php in the root of the views directory you would pass just pass 'main' as the path to view parameter, similarly if it was in views/layouts/main you would pass 'layouts/main'.

Rendering:

To render a view you can either use
```
 	`$this->view->render('path/to/view');`
```
from within any controller which has extended the base controller.

Binding Data:

You can also bind data to views which will be declared as variables within the rendered view's scope by calling:
```
 	`$this->view->bind('varname', 'value');`
```

The bind methods are chainable so you can bind multiple variables in a single call with:

 	`$this->view->bind('var1', 'val1')->bind('var2', 'val2')->render('path/to/view');`

Rendering a view from within a view:

To render a another view within a view you can simply instantiate a new view class with the new keyword:
```
 	`$subview = new View();
 	 $subview->bind('var1', 'val1')
 	 		 ->render('path/to/subview');`
```
Or alternatively call a view with the static method 'make':
```
 	`View::make('path/to/view');`
```

You can also bind data by passing an array as the 2nd parameter:

 	`View::make('path/to/view', array(
 								'var1' => 'val1',
 								'var2' => 'val2'
 								)
 		);`

Putting it together

See the documentation for full details on the public API of the framework

petecoop/php-mvc-lite