The main idea behind FuelPHP Application Development Blueprints is to teach you FuelPHP's basic and advanced features by building various projects of increasing levels of complexity. It is very result-oriented; at the beginning of the chapters, we specify the application we want to build, and then we progressively implement it by learning how to use new FuelPHP features along the way. Our approach will therefore be very practical; a lot of concepts will be explained using code examples, or by integrating them directly into our projects. Thus, it is important to highlight that there will be a lot of code and you should be comfortable with reading and understanding PHP and HTML. As we will use them from time to time, having some knowledge about server/system administration and some foundation in JavaScript, jQuery, and CSS will be an added advantage.
Though this book is for intermediary to advanced web developers, any prior knowledge of the FuelPHP framework, or any other PHP framework, is not required. In order to understand this book, you don't have to know common concepts such as MVC, HMVC, or ORM. We take into account this shortcoming some of you might have, and important notions will be explained. We won't explain all of those in the first chapter though, as we want this to be as painless as possible; we will instead approach them when they become necessary for the project completion.
The ultimate purpose of FuelPHP Application Development Blueprints is to give you the ability to build any project using FuelPHP. By the end of this book, you certainly won't know every little detail of the framework, but you will hopefully have the necessary toolbox required to implement complex and maintainable projects.
Chapter 1, Building Your First FuelPHP Application, covers the very basics of the FuelPHP framework; how to install it, how to configure it, how it is organized, and its main components. Along the way, we will generate our first FuelPHP application using the oil utility and tweak some files, in order to illustrate how things work.
Chapter 2, Building a To-do List Application, focuses on FuelPHP's ORM and debugging features. We will illustrate these features using a lot of examples, and then implement a small to-do list application. We will also use some JavaScript and jQuery to send AJAX requests.
Chapter 3, Building a Blog Application, will teach you how to generate and tweak an administration interface easily, how to create your own modules and tasks, how to manage paginations easily, and how to use the Auth and Email packages. We will create a blog application implementing all these features.
Chapter 4, Creating and Using Packages, will approach the FuelPHP package system. This is a rather short chapter; we will first try to protect our website from spam bots by installing an existing package, and then create our own original solution by creating a new package.
Chapter 5, Building Your Own RESTful API, covers more advanced subjects such as building a JSON API, using language agnostic template engines, allowing user subscriptions, and implementing unit tests. To illustrate this, we will create a responsive micro blogging application featuring a public API.
Chapter 6, Building a Website Using Novius OS, will quickly introduce you to Novius OS, a FuelPHP-based Content Management System. Using such a system can greatly speed up the implementation of complex projects.
The applications in this book are based on FuelPHP 1.7.2, which requires:
A web server: The most common solution is Apache
A PHP interpreter: The 5.3.3 version or greater
A database: we will use MySQL
FuelPHP works on Unix-like and Windows operating systems. The mod_rewrite Apache module and some additional PHP extensions are recommended; the complete list is available at http://fuelphp.com/docs/requirements.html.
This book is for intermediary to seasoned web developers who want to learn how to use the FuelPHP framework and to build complex projects using it. You should be familiar with PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but no prior knowledge about MVC frameworks is required.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Remove
APPPATH/classes/controller/welcome.phpas we don't need this controller anymore."
A block of code is set as follows:
<?php
echo Form::checkbox(
'still_here',
1,
Input::post(
'still_here',
isset($monkey) ? $monkey->still_here : true
)
);
?>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: " Click on the Generate button."
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