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:

1. All controller classes must be derived from the base class Controller

2. Always prepend with 'Controller_'

3. 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

4. The directory structure, naming structure and inheritance structure should all match. e.g:

   • Controller_Admin_Controlpanel extends Controller_Admin which extends Controller

5. 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'.

1. 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.

2. 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');`
  

3. 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