I was recently looking at the new design of A Small Orange, a hosting company. Would you guess, just looking at it, that it uses Bootstrap?

I didn’t realize at first, until I moused over an image and noticed the popover that appeared. I recognized it as a re-colored Bootstrap feature, and checked the page source to confirm it. Handy, easy to implement, and yet you could even restyle it beyond recognition if you wanted to.

There are already plenty of sites using Bootstrap to create unique designs, rather just as a no-design solution to throw together a quick page. The trick is finding them, since by definition they wouldn’t look like Bootstrap sites…

Enter GluePHP.

GluePHP is a lightweight framework (really, it’s a single class!) that only does one thing: it routes URLs to PHP  classes. It “glues” (the developer’s pun, not mine) everything together by routing URLs like example.org/asdf to your class with the name “asdf.” By implementing GET() and POST() methods, you can fire off other methods and output results.

A simple example, that doesn’t use any of the more advanced features like regular expressions in URLs, would look like this (from the documentation):

require_once('glue.php');

$urls = array(
'/' => 'index'
);

class index {
function GET() {
echo "Hello, World!";
}
}

glue::stick($urls);

I would say it’s worth bookmarking if you do much PHP work. It would be great for throwing together quick websites or tech demos.

Perhaps the best news is that PHP4 support is being dropped in favor of a minimum version of PHP 5.1. Hopefully this means we will see CodeIgniter move towards a more object-oriented approach, like its spinoff/fork Kohana.

Also, CodeIgniter is being split into two branches: Core and Reactor. Core will be a slowly-updated branch that EllisLab will use for their products (e.g. ExpressionEngine), freeing up the primary community-driven Reactor branch to be more quickly developed.

CodeIgniter 2.0.0 Released [CodeIgniter]

There are quite a few php frameworks out there. Some huge, some small; Some useful, some not. I often hear developers, even myself, complain about frameworks in php not having or not doing something the way they/we want it too. So my solution? Roll your own framework! This series of articles is going to give you a brief and quick intro on how to do just that. We are going to cover url routing, basic database connection, basic templating and basic rewrite rules for Apache. What we will not cover is ORM development, advanced routing and installation of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Also error checking will be next to none as this is just an example.

• Part I: URL Routing and Directory Setup
• Part II: Templating
• Part III: Database Interaction

It’s a neat tutorial, and in the end you’ll have something useful: an organized basis for future PHP projects. You have an underlying structure that will help you get into building your next application sooner.

Ben Cook suggests that people aren’t really interested in buying an individual theme so much as a highly configurable theme that acts more like a framework. A foundation that they can build upon, tweaking it to look how they want through a backend menu. Essentially, Thesis.

Sure it’s nice that companies like iThemes keep turning out new themes, but they’re fighting a losing battle.

People don’t want to purchase a different theme for every new site they create or every time they want to redesign their site. We want a framework that allows us to make a vast array of design changes as quickly and easily as possible.

Personally, I don’t believe this to be the case. I’m not really a Thesis fan myself, preferring to build my sites’ themes “the real way.” I think people still want to buy themes for the design, not just for a tweakable platform. That’s not to say people don’t want customization, far from it. WooThemes is a prime example. Their themes are primarily design-oriented, but they have plenty of customization options in the backend, albeit less than Thesis. I believe that the two points will converge in the future, bringing more and more customization options to more design-oriented themes.

Though I wonder if frameworks like Hybrid and Thematic will gain similar customization options to Thesis, bringing about a similar result. With customization options in the core of a theme framework like Thematic, and a large community of child theme makers, you have the convergence point I predict, no?

There’s no shortage of PHP frameworks…but why should you use one? What are the major advantages?

• MVC – The Model-View-Controller architectural pattern helps you tier your code for easier maintenance. By keeping the data-manipulating logic separate from the bits that handle the display, you make it much easier to change either the template or the underlying code without touching the other.
• Bundled classes – A framework includes classes and helper functions for common tasks, such as database access, pagination, and form handling. Not to mention smaller things, like truncating text to a specific word/character count.
• Rapid development – Frameworks help you create a small to medium-sized application much quicker than if you wrote everything from scratch. If you’re in a hurry, using a framework will help you finish things before you reach that looming deadline.

If you’re a total DIY type, you don’t even need to rely on a third-party PHP framework. You could assemble on yourself, one that’s more specific to the projects you work on.

While CodeIgniter’s legacy support doesn’t stop you from using PHP 5-specific features in your applications, it does make things a bit less…elegant. If you’re going to build a sports car, would you put an old, less-efficient engine inside it?

Enter Kohana, “the swift PHP framework.”

Kohana is a fork of CodeIgniter, but entirely rewritten to be strict PHP 5 OOP. There are some different conventions, but overall the frameworks are similar enough that migrating is relatively painless. I’m still reading through the documentation, but it seems like it’s definitely worth looking into. Some of you may prefer CodeIgniter for their larger community, but it you’re a developer who has ever been frustrated by CodeIgniter’s decision, then you definitely want to have a look at Kohana.

A recent guest post over at Usability Post (by Tyler Tate) shows how to create a grid with your own CSS, 1KB of CSS to be precise.

Here is a fresh take on the CSS grid (loosely based on Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System). Its mission is to be lightweight. And, as I’ll show in part 2, it can be used to streamline page templates for content management. All this in just one measly kilobyte (actually, 662 bytes, but who’s counting).

A few CSS rules and you have your own custom grid framework, which you can easily work the rest of your CSS around.

The 1Kb CSS Grid, Part 1 [Usability Post]

It is a roundup of articles, tutorials and tools of interest to PHP coders, on topics such as security, OOP, frameworks, and WordPress.

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter simplifies many tasks, such as database I/O and form handling, it’s modular architecture allowing you to load various libraries when you need them. It uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern, where the “View” files are templates and such, with the Models and Controllers doing the heavy lifting. Overall the framework tries to promote cleaner, more efficient coding.

Some people don’t like frameworks, some people are lost without them. I’m somewhere in between. They can be helpful in some situations, but I tend to be a bit more DIY when it comes to PHP. It’s all a matter of personal preference, and of course choosing the right tool for the job.

If you have a bit of experience with PHP, it may be worth giving CodeIgniter a look.