Blueprint PHP Framework Tutorial – Part 7 (Templating)
If you’ve followed along this far, you should now have a fairly good working knowledge of controllers, models and views. You may be wondering how the view actually translates into actual output to the page. Well, thats what we’re going to look at in this tutorial. On the way we’ll also look at the Page class and see how we can use that in our templates. [+]
Blueprint PHP Framework Tutorial – Part 6 (Views)
Now that we know how to create models and tie them into the controller, we are going to look at how we can use views to customise the output from the model. There are two types of view built into the framework. The standard ‘View’ for rendering basic outputs and ‘PageView’ which extends ‘View’ to add a few methods for building CSS and JavaScript blocks. We will create our own view and use the ‘Table’ class to build a table to display the output from the model. [+]
Blueprint PHP Framework Tutorial – Part 5 (Models)
From the last tutorial, we saw how controllers were structured. However we only passed a very simple ‘Hello world’ string to the view and didn’t make use of a model. Models are where the business logic of the application take place. The business logic can be anything from querying a database to making calls to an external API etc. The data returned from a model is passed back to the controller and the controller passes it to the view to format before sending it to the template. Simples… [+]
Blueprint PHP Framework Tutorial – Part 4 (Controllers)
The last tutorial in this series covered how the router decides which controller/method to invoke based on the request URL. In part 4, we are going to look at the structure of the controller. You can set up your controller in any way you like, but there are just a few rules you should follow. I will also show you how I build my controllers to make best use of the components in the framework. [+]
Blueprint PHP Framework Tutorial – Part 3 (Routing)
Continuing on from bootstrapping the components of the Blueprint PHP Framework, we are going to look at how the router works and how controller methods are invoked. The routing is probably the most crucial part of any framework and it’s no different with this framework. Once the request has been routed to a controller method, you are free to code in any way you like (even procedurally if you’re that way inclined. Yuk!). However, we will see in later posts that there are more powerful ways of managing the response of the application once the request gets to the controller stage. [+]
Blueprint PHP Framework Tutorial – Part 2 (Bootstrapping)
As promised in part 1 of this tutorial series, I’ll run through how the bootstrap script works, and in doing so, explain some of the core concepts of the framework. I suggest you open the bootstrap script in another tab while reading this so you can see what I’m talking about and follow along. Or if you have downloaded/cloned the project from the github repository, just open the file in your editor (located in /app/bootstrap.php). [+]
Switching to Sublime Text 2
After a a long stint using Panic’s wonderful Coda (probably about 2 or 3 years now), I was ready for a change. Coda has been my go to editor for pretty much everything from PHP to CSS and it has served me well in many areas. But Coda is getting a bit old now and with no news of a release date for Coda 2 (it seems like I’ve been waiting forever), other editors with new and better features are cropping up all the time. [+]