Garden

Almost two years ago I started thinking about rewriting the Lussumo Framework, the framework upon which Vanilla is built. After a year of heavy contemplation, I finally started development on the new version, which I have come to call “Garden”.

My concept for the Garden framework is not to be competition for the likes of The Zend Framework, CakePHP, or even CodeIgniter (to name a few of the other great PHP frameworks), but something both a little less and a little more. My idea was to create a framework that didn’t solve everyproblem, but just most of the common problems we face when developing simple web applications. I wanted to build a framework that had user and permission management built right in. I wanted to build a framework with which you could easily create new applications and throw them alongside any others – and all users, roles, permissions, preferences, plugins, and themes could play nice together.

Markosullivan.ca can safely say that I have accomplished that task.

Recently I had an active member of the Lussumo Community contact me and ask if his plugins for Vanilla 1 would work with Vanilla 2. It was hard to give him the answer that, no, none of the (over 400) plugins for Vanilla 1 would work with Vanilla 2.

Most open source software forum have database setup scripts that are simply a set of SQL instructions that you can inject directly into your database (typically mysql) to get going. Vanilla 1 was no exception to this rule. The benefit of this approach is that you can quickly and easily get your app up and running. The downside to this approach is that when it is time to upgrade the application to a newer version, you have to write extremely convoluted scripts to figure out what application version the user currently user has, or write scripts to examine database table structure to see what fields need to be removed, or what fields need to be added. Hell, it’s even difficult to understand what I just wrote, let alone the code that would go along with it.

The Database Structure Class

Garden does not have any SQL install or update scripts. Instead, every application in garden has a structure.php file which can be used by either the Garden installer, or by the application management screen when enabling that application. The structure.php file contains a set of instructions on how to build the structure of the database. This file uses the DatabaseStructure class to define the structure of the database.

mod_rewrite was an afterthought in Vanilla 1. As a result, markosullivan.ca have always felt that the mod_rewrite mappings were sloppy and really just didn’t make much sense. In Garden, the way pages are accessed is completely different, and definitely deserves explaining. Let’s start by looking at a typical url request in Garden without mod_rewrite enabled:

http://localhost/garden/default.php/garden/settings/configure

Let’s look closer at each part of the request:

http://localhost/garden/default.php: On my development server, I’ve created a folder called garden, and placed all of the garden files I discussed in last week’s preview in it. As you can see, the default.php file that handles all requests is sitting within that folder’s root.

/garden: The next part of the url is the application that is being requested. In this case, we are requesting the “garden” application within the garden framework’s application folder.

/settings: The next part of the url is the controller that is being requested within the garden application. In this example, we are requesting a controller called “Settings”.

/configure: the final part of the url in this example is the method within the “Settings” controller that we are calling. In this example, we are calling $SettingsController->Configure();.

http://localhost/garden/default.php/garden/settings/configure