Creating a PHP5 Framework

Posted on August 30th, 2008 by The Truth

With websites becoming more and more dynamic and interactive, developers often look to frameworks to help build websites and web apps rapidly. While there are a number of great frameworks available, a custom framework gives you the ability to easily customize the framework as you need, and to build with it even quicker - as you would already know the ins and outs of it before working with it. In this series of tutorials, we are going to build our very own PHP5 Development Framework! Let’s start with planning our framework and put the basic structure into place.

Step 1: This Series

In this series, we will create our own PHP5 Framework from scratch. The Framework will include basic content management features, and we will use it to build a web-based directory for a small organization.

Hopefully, as we go along, you will improve, build up and optimize this framework to suite your needs better, however in these tutorials we are aiming to get a simple framework up and running and powering a website.

Over the next few weeks, during these tutorials we will cover:

Creating authentication handler, database abstraction layer and template manager
Bringing these objects together
Using the framework to manage content, and power our site
Creating a fantastic front end design.
Designing for the login process by storyboarding
How the Framework can be extended and expanded

Step 2: Design Patterns and their use within our Framework

When creating any large computer-based system, be it a desktop application, a distributed network system, or a web application there will always be architectural challenges associated with its implementation.

Design patterns address some of these common problems, and we will make use of a number of design patterns as we create our Framework, to ensure that we have a quality, flexible, robust and usable framework, fit for any purpose! In particular, in this tutorial we are going to look at the Singleton pattern and the Registry pattern.

Step 3: Files and Folders

The first thing to get started creating our Framework, is to create a suitable file structure, such that everything has its place. As well as the files powering the framework, we also need to make provisions for files relating to the website we are going to create with our framework. Most websites and web applications have:

Some commonly used functions / objects.
Business logic.
A design

This gives us a great starting point, files relating to each of those three categories should be grouped together in their own section. Take a look at the directory structure below, we will then discuss the reasons for the structure.

Note that the .settings folder and the .project file were created by the IDE I use, and don’t need to be present in your application

Core functions and objects, such as database access, authentication, template handling, email sending objects, email parsing objects, should be stored within a folder called objects, within the PCARegistry folder. This allows us to separate the logic from the Registry (which we will look at shortly) from the objects stored within the Registry.

Next, we need somewhere to store our business logic which is the files we will create which make use of our framework. We should keep these files in a folder called controllers. Each major function that our website or web application does (e.g. business directory listing, providing and managing content, providing an image gallery, etc) would be a separate controller, stored within its own folder within the controllers folder. We are not going to use these in this tutorial, but it is important to have our directory structure in place, so we know how it will work.

The sites design and templates, should be stored within the skins folder. Since we may want different designs (either so users of the application/website we create with our framework can chose from a number of designs, or to change the design depending on season or special event), each skin will be contained within its own folder.

Read The Rest of this Great Tutorial at Nettus