Recent Projects
These projects have reached the ‘finger hovering over the launch button’ stage (they are live), and both were done with some new-ish PHP backend tool technology (Yawp, DB_Table, Savant2) in conjunction with a Glennweb custom CMS system:
All three of these great tools come from Paul Jones, who from the looks of his other projects is quite a busy developer.
Yawp: It’s not a framework but a well thought out class that helps pull together common PHP web development pieces. It is centered around a file-based configuration file which fronts useful tools from Pear and elsewhere. From that configuration file it is easy to setup Error handling, Database Abstraction, Templating systems, Debugging tools, etc.
DB Table: A small footprint Database Abstraction layer which is a Pear project. DB Table encapsulates the table/field definitions and table specific SQL code. It in turn uses the Yawp configured DB (Pear) database connection classes to interface with the database. It can also generate a Pear HTML QuickForms form from the same field definitions, making basic form processing very quick to develop.
Savant2: This is the first of Paul’s projects that I started using. It was an offshoot of some templating code that Brian Lozier had published a couple of years ago, following an article by Harry Fuecks (whew). Before Savant I had cleaned up Brian’s original code and used it in a few projects with great success. Savant takes PHP as Templating language idea quite a bit farther, rolling it into an Object Oriented structure and adding plugins and filters. It makes templating a site and incorporating dynamic site features a very straightforward operation and I have used it on all my recent projects.