Tag Archives: php

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As with the code I’ve released previously, I have found myself cutting and pasting this code about the place again and again, so I’ve packaged up my simple PHP template framework and stuck it on github.

This library comes complete with a basic HTML5, JSON, and JSONP templates, that you can extend and override, making the development of web applications (hopefully) slightly easier. It does for me at any rate, because I really hate repeating myself!

Usage

The default template engine provided by this library – the Basic template – should be fairly familiar to anyone who’s used Elgg or similar systems.

You initialise it with a set of template base paths (“base” provides a basic HTML5 hierachy). If you pass an array to the constructor, each array overrides the one preceding it, and so you can replace some functionality (for example providing a bootstrap layout) without having to replace everything.

Views are in a file hierarchy off of [basepath]/[template_type]/path/to/view.php, and are named simply as the path without the base gumph (in the example I give in the docs, this view would be ‘path/to/view’).

HTML5 versions of pages are in the /default/ template type branch, but the basic template comes with json and jsonp encoding of the pages, you can specify which template to use at runtime by passing the _vt=[branch] variable on the GET line, or from within your program code.

The basic template also makes a call to the simple event dispatcher before and after a given view is generated, passing “view:[viewname with colons instead of slashes]” as the namespace and either “prepend” or “extend” as the event, together with an array of all the variables passed to the view.

So, to listen to my documented example, you’d listen for events on “view:path:to:view” and either “prepend” or “extend”, echoing any extra stuff you want.

Anyway, hopefully this’ll be useful to someone!

» Visit the project on Github...

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So, another in a series of posts where I package up some code I often use into a reusable library, let me introduce a simple PHP library for creating virtual pages.

Virtual pages are pages on a website that are generated in code, and are sent to the client’s browser, but don’t correspond directly to a physical file. This process requires mod_rewrite on Apache, but similar functionality exists in other web servers.

Defining your endpoint

You must specify your endpoint, and then a handling function. This function can be anything callable; functions, methods or an enclosure.

\simple_page_handler\Page::create('my/page/', function($page, array $subpages) {
        // Your page handling code
});

Writing your endpoint handler

You then trigger the handled pages by writing a page handler, and then directing Apache to redirect unhandled requests to this endpoint.

Example endpoint:

try {
        if (!\simple_page_handler\Page::call(\simple_page_handler\Input::get('page'))) {
            \simple_page_handler\Page::set503();
            echo "Something went wrong.";
        }
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
}

And your redirect code:

# Redirect anything that isn't a real file to our example page handler
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ example_page_handler.php?page=$1 [QSA]

Hopefully this’ll be useful to someone!

» Visit the project on Github...

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Following from a similar post, where I packaged up my standard web services libraries to avoid repeating myself, I decided to do the same for Events and triggers.

Events provide a very powerful, flexible and simple way of providing hooks for other code to attach to, in a loosely coupled way. I’ve been using event driven development in my PHP code for years, way back since the first days of Elgg. In Elgg, events and triggers proved to be one of the frameworks most powerful, and a major factor in its success, allowing plugin developers to easily change core functionality without changing a line of core code.

Anyway, I’ve used Events in one form or another in pretty much every framework since, and I’ve found myself increasingly cutting and pasting code around, so I figured it’d be sensible to package this up into a reusable library as well. Although it is designed to be simple, the library is pretty powerful.

One particularly useful feature is that event listeners can include regexp!

Triggering an event…

If you were writing a framework that had users for example, and you wanted to allow plugin authors to hook in and do something when a new user is created, you might do something like this in your registration code…

function registerUser($username, $password) {

    ...
    // User creation code here
    ...

    // Ok, now tell everyone that a user has been created
    \simple_event_dispatcher\Events::trigger('user', 'create', ['user' => $new_user]);

}

Listening to an event…

So, if you wanted to listen to the user creation event inside your plugin…

// Register an event for every time a user is created
\simple_event_dispatcher\Events::register('user', 'create', function($namespace, $event, &$parameters) { 

    // Your code here

});

You can replace any part of the $namespace or $event string in Events::register (‘user‘ and ‘create‘ respectively in the example above) with regular expression. So, you could, for example, replace ‘user‘ with ‘*‘ to listen with any create event.

Code on GitHub, have fun!

» Visit the project on Github...