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

Framework solution


All the menu items for a system can be stored in a single database table. The items can be grouped together to form a menu, using an identifying field that is defined in a unique row of a menu type table.

A number of other fields have obvious uses, and the present Aliro menu table is shown in the following screenshot:

The basic fields, whose purpose should be relatively clear, are as follows:

  • id: A unique integer key.

  • menutype: Is used to group menu entries into a menu, so is effectively the name of one particular menu. It is a unique field in the menu type table.

  • name: Is the name of the item, and will be shown to the user.

  • link: Is a complete or relative URI that defines where the menu item is to point.

  • type: Is the type of entry, and although there are various possible entries for backwards compatibility, the current possibilities are "url" for a link that has been fully entered by an administrator or "component" for a relative link that has been built by choosing...