/minimal-mvc-framework

A proof of concept for a simple-as-possible MVC framework in PHP

Primary LanguagePHP

Minimal MVC Framework

This is a research / proof of concept project to build a minimal MVC framework in PHP. After looking at several MVC frameworks in PHP, I thought they were all too complicated to setup, and too over-engineered to my liking.

Things I didn't like, were:

  • complicated and deep directory structures were dictated in order to organise Models, Controllers, Views and config files.
  • lots of abstraction levels in order to facilitate many use cases I never needed, but was forced to implement.

My conclusion was actually that there must be reasons I wasn't aware of for all this complexity. The only way to find out what those were, was to try and write it myself. This project is a simple-as-possible MVC framework, written in ~300 LOC (excluding the example application). I don't say it's production quality, but it works and has all basic features.

Setup

In order to try the framework, you can check out the code, and configure a webserver to serve the public/ folder as the directory root. If you're not using Apache, you should replicate the simple mod_rewrite setup from public/.htaccess in your http server setup.

Example application

The directory example-app is a simple application that has a few controllers that show basic usage of controllers and views. The PersonsController shows usage of a Model populated with a (read-only) JSON data file, while the PiesController demonstrates using an sqlite database.

Usage

If you want to create your own application using the framework, you need to create a directory somewhere and point the $app_dir in public/index.php to it. By default, controllers and views are expected to be named after their route.

For a page available at http://<application-url>/foo/bar, you should create in the application root directory:

  • a file FooController.php containing class FooController
  • a directory Foo with file Foo/bar.phtml which is the template for the view.

You can take a look at the example application and the api documentation for pointers on how to start.

Documentation

You can use Doxygen to generate simple API documentation for all files. After running doxygen, the documentation should be available under doc/, or at http://<application-url>/doxygen-docs/.