indigo/indigo

Indigo PHP Framework

Indigo

• Author: Steve Phillips
  http://stevephillips.me
• Version: alpha
• License: GPL 3

Assertion

A highly modular, minimalistic PHP 5.4+ framework that manages the essential functions of a web request, without forcing design constraints and allowing any functionality that can be overridden to be overridden., _(*1)

About

The Indigo framework is a concise, yet robust framework. It is the result of several self-made frameworks, with influence from Drupal and Kohana. I began this project after building a basic, decent framework while overhauling an existing code base. I liked where the system was going and wanted to separate it from the existing application into something that can be quickly deployed elsewhere., _(*2)

It takes heavy inspiration from Drupal and Kohana in its overall structure, but aims to reduce the overhead of Drupal and improve the flexibility of Kohana. The end result aims to be a minimalistic MVC that handles basic form validation, user login, permissions, GET/POST processing and other basic features, all without forcing any design constraints on the end user. However, to keep the proejct minimalistic, most of these extra features will be bundled as modules that can be enabled or disabled at will., _(*3)

Goals

Indigo's goals are subject to change at any time. The goals should never violate the assertion listed above. As this project progresses, the goals will become more refined. The goal list should not grow considerably, and if changes are to be made it is preferred that the goal list be reduced rather than increased., _(*4)

Any excessive goals can always be turned into a module, and feature creep should be closely monitored., _(*5)

1. Create a router that can map a route to a controller/page in a style similar to Drupal, encouraging hierarchical URLs and not forcing a strict {controller}/{page} format. User permissions will be provided by the routes to restrict access prior to the page ever being loaded, as well as restricting access to links.
2. Create models that are similar to Kohana's, emplying PDO and the strategy pattern to allow for multiple database storage engines. This will require a robust query builder. The models will also employ my magic column pattern for dynamic member properties. In addition, the models will include field validation as a member property to ensure data passes validation. This will be the Seafoam module and can be replaced by any ORM that a developer desires, so long as an appropriate adapter is created.
3. Incorporate user logins and sessions as a module, while not forcing any particulars such as the HTML of the login form, the hashing method for the passwords (while supporting both bcrypt and PBKDF2 by default), or even the table name/fields. User permissions will also be handled in a style inspired by Drupal's permission/role system.
4. Provide an HTML library that handles commonly used functionality, such as menus, links forms, selects, etc., without forcing HTML markup. This will be done through Drupal inspired .tpl.php files that can be overridden on multiple levels - at the system, in a theme, in a module or in the application itself.
5. Create a system folder that is separate from a sites folder, similar to Drupal's sites folder. This will allow a single core install to be used by multiple sites, each one with its own dependencies.
6. Manage dependencies with composer, allowing the core and each site to specify different versions of packages to be used, similar to Drupal's modules, sites/all/modules and sites/{site}/modules. Eventually, Indigo could have its own Composer repository of modules.
7. Force high security on sessions and form processing without the application developer having to worry about anything, unless they want to.
8. Rely on exceptions and exception handling to deal with critical errors. This includes:
   • When a model attempts to be saved with data that does not match validation, throw a ModelException.
   • When a user tries to access a page that is not allowed under current permissions, throw an AuthException.
   • When a form or session security violation is critical, throw a SecurityException.
   • When a page does not exist, through a RouterException.
9. Use an event system similar to Kohana's 2.3 hooks that allows any module to modify the behavior of core functionality without having to modify the core itself. Events will have distinct, appropriate names and provide necessary information to the event handler, and appropriately react to changed behavior.

Copyright

Copyright (C) 2012 Steve Phillips, _(*6)

This file is part of Indigo., _(*7)

Indigo is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version., _(*8)

Indigo is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details., _(*9)

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Indigo. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/., _(*10)