I am in the process of learning Kohana 3. Just curious: some Kohana 3 projects I have looked at, like Kohanut CMS are implemented as one big module and located in /modules instead of /application (which is empty). Why is that? Only to make it easier to drag just one folder if you upgrade Kohana later?
All depends what you are doing. I sometimes split different sections of my application into multiple modules. Usually its just for organization or if you want to use that piece on another application.
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I have experience with Joomla and have modified and wrote some simple Joomla extensions. I don't have experience using one of the popular PHP frameworks (such as CakePHP), but I was thinking about using the Joomla framework because I'm familiar with Joomla. How would I use the Joomla framework for a software project instead of using regular Joomla and writing the extensions needed for it to extend it's capabilities? Thanks!
The basic idea is that you:
Get a copy of either the whole framework or just the packages you need+dependencies (from github or composer) or use the older copy that is shipped with the CMS,
Bootstrap your application (JApplicationWeb or JApplicationCli).
Write your code using the MVC structure provided.
The big difference with writing a totally independent application is that you are doing just that, you need to build everything in the application whereas in the CMS there are already a lot of things in place. (The good part of that is that you can make new code with no legacy concerns.) For example, if you look at the JIssues project you'll see that they had to think about things like authentication. So as you would expect writing a simple application is simple, writing a complex one is complex.
You can see many examples of framework applications around, ranging from the ones found in the CLI folder of your CMS installation to JIssues, and of course the three web applications in the CMS are all examples of applications on the framework.
The Joomla Framework is intended (among other things) to be the platform upon which you can build a web-application. The framework is like the frame of one of those motorcycles they build on "American Choppers." It provides the backdrop so that you can hit the ground thinking about your app without worrying about User Authentication, database connection, and a thousand other things like those that get in the way of bringing your app to its potential audience.
If you're trying to extend Joomla, the current edition is what you should be using.
I'm in planing process of my e-commerce solution and now the final question is how to implement language system.
In past i worked with e-commerce solutions such as Magento, eCommerce and OpenCart however i would like to avoid their approach as it was horrible and in the end it slowed down the entire application.
Take Magento for instance, it keeps language files in seperate folders and then code loads languages from files in that folder. The language files have over 10k lines and a lot of words and sentances repeat it selves for diffirent modules and the file has to be read on each load.
I have a HMVC arhitecture and was thinking to expand that where each module that is part of the solution would have it's own language file however this is Magentos approach and it's not the best of solutions.
I want my language file system to be as simple as possible and short keeping button names and label names in it and allowing anyone that wants to translate it to have easy time doing so.
As i have a HMVC arhitecture i wanted to expand it and make it so that each module has it's own language file/class this way you only need to translate those modules that you are actually using instead of the appliaction to load all translations at once even for modules that are not being displayed.
But i feel that keeping translations like this could prove problematic for performance and simplicity. I did look in to GoogleTranslate plugin option and while it's pretty decent i fell it's not ready yet nor a proper solution.
What would be the best approach here.
If your HMVC architecture uses some kind of PHP framework, it may have APIs for dealing with translation issues. For example, in CodeIgniter you can use the Language Class, and in CakePHP you can use the i18n class.
Note that CodeIgniter currently uses plain PHP files to load the languages, so it's probably not as efficient as CakePHP (that can load the files from .po/.mo files or databases).
If you are not currently using one, you can try the Zend Framework's translation module. Note that you don't need to use all the Zend Framework (as it is highly modular too). If you still don't want that to clutter your project's space, you can use plain gettext().
This is my first question here. :)
I am working on a little php framework and started to think of ways to re-use the same code between multiple projects. Right now with this framework it is possible to make multiple application directories for different projects and use the same core - similar of what codeigniter 2 does.
The question about code reuse raised at work when I needed to make a website that is quite different from existing one, but would still use classes from it.
My first two ideas was either use some kind of a global "models" directory where to place files shared between multiple projects (and add option to framework to load them), or to add a possibility to load these "models" from other project(s).
I thought maybe somebody else have some better ideas and wanted to know other developer thoughts on the subject in general.
As an example this could be the current directory structure:
live/ - live site
config/
controllers/
helpers/
models/
public/
views/
admin/ - administration (same structure as "live/")
system/ - framework core
Well I don't think loading models or other classes directly from another project is a good idea. If two or more projects share the same classes, they should be located somewhere outside of both projects. This is the situation where the codeigniter packages comes in handy. It allows to have separate folder for all of your libraries, models etc. and load them in any codeigniter project very easily. Take a look at the official documentation for more details.
I am looking to reduce redundancies in code shared across entire web sites. I have tinkered with several frameworks but cannot think of any that allow you to EASILY separate the framework code from the site code while sharing it to multiple sites at the same time.
What PHP frameworks can do this easily?
EDIT - I am trying to determine which frameworks are the easiest to share.. I was already guessing that nearly all could be shared, but which frameworks are geared towards sharing? It sounds like Yii recommends placing the framework code outside the site code, that is a good start.
If someone is sharing the same framework code across sites already, I would love to know about that.
It's pretty easy to do that with Fuel (http://fuelphp.com).
Each website has an index.php where some paths are defined:
/**
* Set all the paths here
*/
$app_path = '../fuel/app/';
$package_path = '../fuel/packages/';
$core_path = '../fuel/core/';
As you can see, you may share the core and packages in a central repository and create a single app and public folders to each web site.
You may even share an app with different web sites customizing stuff (let's say, the site title or the database used) by just setting a different environment in the .htaccess. That works out-of-the-box for development/stage/production sites, for example, but may be extended to anything. You may also setup central packages to use in multiple apps. Powerful, easy and just works.
Many can do this. For instance YII is supposed to be installed OUTSIDE of your www-root directory (httpdocs, /var/www/ or something like that). You can use several sites to point to that base dir.
Any framework (or part) that does not need specific settings for your site can be shared among multiple sites I guess.
I believe Zend can do what you ask, possibly even Symfony and Fuel, and I'm sure many other frameworks that allow you to pick what parts of it to use will let you do this.
However, doing so will require you to do a little more configuring to get it all running. Which is kind of why I ended up creating my own framework.
Symfony does. I love the Symfony framework, and it comes with some great frameworks. You might like the Routing and YAML ones. A person I know calls Symfony the best php framework.
Symfony components
Some of the components have their own specific sites
You can find a really good documentation here.
Symfony2 is suitable for your needs. It's a full stack framework with a lot of standalone components. It works with "bundles", a bundle is a kind of container with a complete logic (controllers, model objects, views, assets, configuration, ...). That means you write one bundle and you can reuse it without any problem.
But you can also consider symfony 1.4. One project can handles many applications so your model is shared across these applications and the same code can be reused in all applications. Note an application can be a complete website.
I can't think of any frameworks that do this natively, but you could use several SVN (or hg, etc) repositories to accomplish this. Example using CakePHP:
1 repo has the CakePHP default files. If you wish to update CakePHP,
you update this repo in the future.
1 repo per website that stores everything inside your app folder.
It's not built in functionality, but it isn't very difficult to setup either.
I'm starting to familiarize myself with using the module-based architecture for zend framework projects. My real reason behind being interested in the module architecture is to be able to take a module from one project and just drop it into another project. Maybe I'm not getting it right..
But what I'm noticing right off the bat is that controllers within each module cannot have the same name as any other controller in the main application (or in any other module, though I haven't tested this). This leads me to think that modules are not really independent self-contained units, so I wonder how this affects their ease of distribution from one project to another.
The other issue is what if I were to take a module and drop it into another project. Do I have to update the .zfproject.xml manually? and wouldn't that be a bit too cumbersome to be done manually?
Maybe I'm not clear on how modules should be used in zend, so I'd like to know when you decide it's best to use them, and when do you decide not to use them, or do you use them all the time, or do you never use them?
I always used module based architecture so far in my projects, because I like to separate concepts. For example I have always an ADMIN module whose classes and controllers dont mix with the rest of the application. Using modules you can reuse modules for other applications, for example if you create a BLOG module.
The names of your controllers will be something like Admin_IndexController for the admin module even if the file is named IndexController.php.
Another concept that is nice and help you reuse resources is the plugins. Use them for authentication or to check validity of the requests.
You need to setup namespaces for your modules so that they are easily moved into a new project without renaming.
If you are using Zend Tool then you will have to edit the zfproject.xml. I haven't spent a lot of time using this so I'm not sure if there is another way without manually editing.