Book Image

PHP 5 CMS Framework Development - 2nd Edition

By : Martin Brampton
Book Image

PHP 5 CMS Framework Development - 2nd Edition

By: Martin Brampton

Overview of this book

If you want an insight into the critical design issues and programming techniques required for a web oriented framework in PHP5, this book will be invaluable. Whether you want to build your own CMS style framework, want to understand how such frameworks are created, or simply want to review advanced PHP5 software development techniques, this book is for you.As a former development team leader on the renowned Mambo open-source content management system, author Martin Brampton offers unique insight and practical guidance into the problem of building an architecture for a web oriented framework or content management system, using the latest versions of popular web scripting language PHP.The scene-setting first chapter describes the evolution of PHP frameworks designed to support web sites by acting as content management systems. It reviews the critical and desirable features of such systems, followed by an overview of the technology and a review of the technical environment.Following chapters look at particular topics, with:• A concise statement of the problem • Discussion of the important design issues and problems faced • Creation of the framework solution At every point, there is an emphasis on effectiveness, efficiency and security – all vital attributes for sound web systems. By and large these are achieved through thoughtful design and careful implementation. Early chapters look at the best ways to handle some fundamental issues such as the automatic loading of code modules and interfaces to database systems. Digging deeper into the problems that are driven by web requirements, following chapters go deeply into session handling, caches, and access control. New for this edition is a chapter discussing the transformation of URLs to turn ugly query strings into readable strings that are believed to be more “search engine friendly” and are certainly more user friendly. This topic is then extended into a review of ways to handle “friendly” URLs without going through query strings, and how to build RESTful interfaces. The final chapter discusses the key issues that affect a wide range of specific content handlers and explores a practical example in detail.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
PHP 5 CMS Framework Development
Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
Packaging Extensions
Packaging XML Example

Exploring PHP XML handling


From the outset, we committed ourselves to PHP 5. Extension handling requires that XML be processed, as the means to define how a particular extension should be installed. Fortunately, PHP 5 greatly improves the XML handling tools available to us.

The easy way to parse the XML belonging to an extension is to employ the PHP 5 SimpleXML facility. The XML is loaded and turned into a set of objects by SimpleXML. The provided objects can be processed by simple mechanisms such as iteration and subscripting.

To see what can be done, consider the moderately complex XML shown in Appendix B, which is used for packaging the Aliro component that handles login and user management. It is actually an application, and incorporates three modules and a plugin.

The whole of the XML can be loaded and parsed just by calling the simplexml_load_file function. Given my strong orientation towards standards, I favor setting options in the call to include LIBXML_DTDVALID, which will cause...