Plan for Michael "Evic" Wales

phpIndie - Indie Website Development Framework

For those of you with Torque2D, this post will run you through a bit of a discussion on this topic.

For those of you without access to that forum, I will simply run through a quick introduction to this product here. I welcome any and all comments and suggestions.

phpIndie started from a short .plan from Phil Carlisle. I had the basic idea of this in my head, but was unsure if there really was a "market" for such a product. Phil's .plan confirmed that market, so I have done a bit of planning since then, a lot of testing and building demo apps, and I am ready to make the next step in the development of this framework.

Essentially, phpIndie will be a framework that will allow Indie's to easily create their product's website with a primary focus on the content. phpIndie will handle all content management via it's standard "modules" such as basic content management (the creation of pages, deletion, editing, etc), forums, screenshot galleries, polls, and file management.

A standard set of templates will be released for live usage or use as examples to create your own templates. A template will consist of both a .tpl file and a .css file.

The "flow of content" is as follows (for addition of a new page):
- The webmaster will enter the content via a Content Management System, and select the page's location within the navigational tree.
- When a user visits the website, they will activate a "content retrieval" script, which will retrieve the content from the databas.
- The content retrieval script will contain all PHP code necessary to render the page, and will activate the template.
- The template will determine where the content is position within the HTML source.
- The template file will refer to a CSS document for all formatting purposes.

This process will be virtually the same for all content additions. It sounds rather confusing at first, but when you think of it from a design-only standpoint, it's quite effective. You only need to develop one "template set" (the .tpl file and the .css file).

I have attempted to find ways to eliminate the need for the .tpl file, but I feel it's very important to use a templating system in this framework, as it provides a nice seperation between code and design. If you need a visual representation I recommend heading to www.csszengarden.com/ as their .html file and .css file is pretty much a straight-shot example at what I am working with (albeit we are using a template file, using a template layer between the content and template).

The entire framework is very modular, with a simple drop-in and activation method, to provide many other applications such as project management, version management, and anything else a PHP programmer feels like adding.

I wanted to go into a bit of detail over some of the modules that will be released as standard, but I think this .plan is running long enough as it is and my friends are bugging me to go out.