README

Sitegear is an extensible, configurable and modular website management application.

Sitegear consists of a website framework and a set of integrated content management tools. It is aimed primarily at websites based on owner-driven driven content. One of the primary driving goals is to reduce development time for these types of websites specifically. For more dynamic, user-driven websites, please consider an MVC framework.

Modules

Sitegear is modular, allowing unlimited possibilities for extensibility. There are several core modules, which are always available. Higher level functionality is found in extension modules.

Each module may serve one or more specific purposes:

Container for entities
Provider of controller methods and related view scripts
Provider of client-side resources (JavaScript, CSS, etc)
Provider of user management tools

Customisation

Sitegear is highly configurable, directly via a config file mechanism. This means that much of the application's behaviour can be modified by changing some (well-documented!) settings. Configuration can also be applied on a per-environment basis. This is useful, for example, to test and demonstrate a mail form without spamming the "real" target email address, while knowing that in production, the correct email address will be used.

View scripts provided by modules can also be very easily overridden, by providing a site-specific view script with the relevant filename (and path). This allows for further customisation as the entire markup can be modified.

DSL

Sitegear features a simple yet powerful Domain Specific Language for view scripts. This provides access to a range of functionality using a structured call pattern:

<?php echo $view->foo()->bar(); ?>

Where foo is either the name of a module, or one of several special "pseudo-module" specifiers, and bar is the name of a target within the specified module.

Arguments can also be passed as described below.

Decorators

The first (module) call's arguments are decorators. These can take many forms but at their simplest they are a string containing only the name of the decorator. There are several built-in decorators, and you can add your own. The following example adds a wrapper element which marks the block as editable by the content management tools:

<?php echo $view->foo('editable')->bar(); ?>

Decorators can also be applied using the decorate() method. The following call is equivalent to the one above:

<?php echo $view->foo()->bar()->decorate('editable'); ?>

Decorators can also take arguments. These can be passed in string form or array form. The following to calls are equivalent, they both wrap the block in a li element:

<?php echo $view->foo('element("li")')->bar(); ?>
<?php echo $view->foo(array( 'name' => 'element', 'arguments' => array( 'li' ) )); ?>

Target Controllers

The second (method) call's arguments are passed to a component controller. This acts similarly to the main (page) controller action method, but with a restricted scope. For example the following would pass a string and an integer to the component controller method.

<?php echo $view->foo()->bar('a label', 100); ?>

The arguments passed must match the target controller's expectations. Note that the View object and the Request object can be passed automatically using type hinting detection.

Foundation Technologies

The Sitegear application is based on:

PHP 5.3
Composer
Symfony Components
Doctrine
PSR-3 compatible logging interfaces
Unit testing with PhpUnit

The available modules provide integrations with a range of services, including:

Google Analytics
Google Maps
SwiftMailer
MailChimp

The content management tools operate in the web browser, and are based on:

jQuery and jQueryUI
(some wysiwyg editor, unsure which one yet)
(some file browser, unsure which one yet)

Unit Tests

Unit test coverage is in progress, but all tests should pass. To run the tests:

composer install --dev
phpunit

Further Information

For more information, see the website: http://sitegear.org/

Available under MIT open source license. See the LICENSE for details.

sitegear / sitegear

Maintainers

Details