PHP-MVC Project: Encouraging Model-View-Control application structure

PHP-MVC Project: Encouraging Model-View-Control application structure

 


The PHP-MCV Project is a set of scripts that encourage the use of Model-View-Control application structure. There’s an advanced version that also comes with automatic SASS compiling and additional Twig support.

MINI

MINI is an extremely simple and easy to understand skeleton PHP application, reduced to the max. MINI is NOT a professional framework and it does not come with all the stuff real frameworks have. If you just want to show some pages, do a few database calls and a little-bit of AJAX here and there, without reading in massive documentations of highly complex professional frameworks, then MINI might be very useful for you. MINI is easy to install, runs nearly everywhere and doesn't make things more complicated than necessary.
For a deeper introduction into MINI have a look into this blog post: MINI, an extremely simple barebone PHP application.

Features

  • extremely simple, easy to understand
  • simple but clean structure
  • makes "beautiful" clean URLs
  • demo CRUD actions: Create, Read, Update and Delete database entries easily
  • demo AJAX call
  • tries to follow PSR 1/2 coding guidelines
  • uses PDO for any database requests, comes with an additional PDO debug tool to emulate your SQL statements
  • commented code
  • uses only native PHP code, so people don't have to learn a framework

Forks of MINI

TINY

MINI has a smaller brother, named TINY. It's similar to MINI, but runs without mod_rewrite in nearly every environment. Not suitable for live sites, but nice for quick prototyping.

MINI2

MINI also has a bigger brother, named MINI2. It's even simpler, has been built using Slim and has nice features like SASS-compiling, Twig etc.

Requirements

  • PHP 5.3.0+
  • MySQL
  • mod_rewrite activated (tutorials below, but there's also TINY, a mod_rewrite-less version of MINI)

Installation (in Vagrant, 100% automatic)

If you are using Vagrant for your development, then you can install MINI with one click (or one command on the command line) [Vagrant doc]. MINI comes with a demo Vagrant-file (defines your Vagrant box) and a demo bootstrap.sh which automatically installs Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, git and Composer, sets a chosen password in MySQL and PHPMyadmin and even inside the application code, downloads the Composer-dependencies, activates mod_rewrite and edits the Apache settings, downloads the code from GitHub and runs the demo SQL statements (for demo data). This is 100% automatic, you'll end up after +/- 5 minutes with a fully running installation of MINI2 inside an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Vagrant box.
To do so, put Vagrantfile and bootstrap.sh from _vagrant inside a folder (and nothing else). Do vagrant box add ubuntu/trusty64 to add Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ("Trusty Thar") 64bit to Vagrant (unless you already have it), then do vagrant up to run the box. When installation is finished you can directly use the fully installed demo app on 192.168.33.44. As this just a quick demo environment the MySQL root password and the PHPMyAdmin root password are set to 12345678, the project is installed in /var/www/html/myproject. You can change this for sure inside bootstrap.sh.

Auto-Installation on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (in 30 seconds)

You can install MINI including Apache, MySQL, PHP and PHPMyAdmin, mod_rewrite, Composer, all necessary settings and even the passwords inside the configs file by simply downloading one file and executing it, the entire installation will run 100% automatically. Find the tutorial in this blog article: Install MINI in 30 seconds inside Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Installation

  1. Edit the database credentials in application/config/config.php
  2. Execute the .sql statements in the _install/-folder (with PHPMyAdmin for example).
  3. Make sure you have mod_rewrite activated on your server / in your environment. Some guidelines: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, EasyPHP on Windows, AMPPS on Windows/Mac OS, XAMPP for Windows, MAMP on Mac OS
MINI runs without any further configuration. You can also put it inside a sub-folder, it will work without any further configuration. Maybe useful: A simple tutorial on How to install LAMPP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, PHPMyAdmin) on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the same for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Server configs for

nginx

server {
    server_name default_server _;   # Listen to any servername
    listen      [::]:80;
    listen      80;

    root /var/www/html/myproject/public;

    location / {
        index index.php;
        try_files /$uri /$uri/ /index.php?url=$uri;
    }

    location ~ \.(php)$ {
        fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index  index.php;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}
A deeper discussion on nginx setups can be found here.

Security

The script makes use of mod_rewrite and blocks all access to everything outside the /public folder. Your .git folder/files, operating system temp files, the application-folder and everything else is not accessible (when set up correctly). For database requests PDO is used, so no need to think about SQL injection (unless you are using extremely outdated MySQL versions).

Goodies

MINI comes with a little customized PDO debugger tool (find the code in application/libs/helper.php), trying to emulate your PDO-SQL statements. It's extremely easy to use:
$sql = "SELECT id, artist, track, link FROM song WHERE id = :song_id LIMIT 1";
$query = $this->db->prepare($sql);
$parameters = array(':song_id' => $song_id);

echo Helper::debugPDO($sql, $parameters);

$query->execute($parameters);

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. This means you can use and modify it for free in private or commercial projects.

Support

If you want to support MINI, then rent your next server at Host1Plus. Thanks! :)

My blog

And by the way, I'm also blogging at Dev Metal.

Quick-Start

The structure in general

The application's URL-path translates directly to the controllers (=files) and their methods inside application/controllers.
example.com/home/exampleOne will do what the exampleOne() method in application/controllers/home.php says.
example.com/home will do what the index() method in application/controllers/home.php says.
example.com will do what the index() method in application/controllers/home.php says (default fallback).
example.com/songs will do what the index() method in application/controllers/songs.php says.
example.com/songs/editsong/17 will do what the editsong() method in application/controllers/songs.php says and will pass 17 as a parameter to it.
Self-explaining, right ?

Showing a view

Let's look at the exampleOne()-method in the home-controller (application/controllers/home.php): This simply shows the header, footer and the example_one.php page (in views/home/). By intention as simple and native as possible.
public function exampleOne()
{
    // load view
    require APP . 'views/_templates/header.php';
    require APP . 'views/home/example_one.php';
    require APP . 'views/_templates/footer.php';
}

Working with data

Let's look into the index()-method in the songs-controller (application/controllers/songs.php): Similar to exampleOne, but here we also request data. Again, everything is extremely reduced and simple: $this->model->getAllSongs() simply calls the getAllSongs()-method in application/model/model.php.
public function index()
{
    // getting all songs and amount of songs
    $songs = $this->model->getAllSongs();
    $amount_of_songs = $this->model->getAmountOfSongs();

   // load view. within the view files we can echo out $songs and $amount_of_songs easily
    require APP . 'views/_templates/header.php';
    require APP . 'views/songs/index.php';
    require APP . 'views/_templates/footer.php';
}
For extreme simplicity, all data-handling methods are in application/model/model.php. This is for sure not really professional, but the most simple implementation. Have a look how getAllSongs() in model.php looks like: Pure and super-simple PDO.
public function getAllSongs()
{
    $sql = "SELECT id, artist, track, link FROM song";
    $query = $this->db->prepare($sql);
    $query->execute();

    return $query->fetchAll();
}
The result, here $songs, can then easily be used directly inside the view files (in this case application/views/songs/index.php, in a simplified example):
<tbody>
<?php foreach ($songs as $song) { ?>
    <tr>
        <td><?php if (isset($song->artist)) echo htmlspecialchars($song->artist, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); ?></td>
        <td><?php if (isset($song->track)) echo htmlspecialchars($song->track, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); ?></td>
    </tr>
<?php } ?>
</tbody>

History

MINI is the successor of php-mvc. As php-mvc didn't provide a real MVC structure (and several people complained about that - which is totally right!) I've renamed and rebuild the project.

Dear haters, trolls and everything-sucks-people...

... MINI is just a simple helper-tool I've created for my daily work, simply because it was much easier to setup and to handle than real frameworks. For daily agency work, quick prototyping and frontend-driven projects it's totally okay, does the job and there's absolutely no reason to discuss why it's "shit compared to Laravel", why it does not follow several MVC principles or why there's no personal unpaid support or no russian translation or similar weird stuff. The trolling against Open-Source-projects (and their authors) has really reached insane dimensions.
I've written this unpaid, voluntarily, in my free-time and uploaded it on GitHub to share. It's totally free, for private and commercial use. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you see issues, then please write a ticket (and if you are really cool: I'm very thankful for any commits!). But don't bash, don't complain, don't hate. Only bad people do so.

Contribute

Please commit into the develop branch (which holds the in-development version), not into master branch (which holds the tested and stable version).



Phpmvc

GitHub: https://github.com/panique/php-mvc