[Phpslash-devel] phpSlash 0.8 stuff of interest

[Joe S. <joe...@us...>]

Mike and I were discussing upgrading BE to use phpSlash 0.8.

It turned to listing some of the new features and 
benefits of using phpSlash 0.8.  I brought up a few things that I 
thought were useful and interesting.  

Just off the top of my head so not formal at all.

Here goes:

modules built for this framework do not require new pages in the
public_html directories.  They can be accessed via url arguments.

The module index and admin pages don't have to worry about any page
layout.  Only their own formatting.  They simply return the output to
the controller.  Really no other rules.

Quasi-MVC framework.  All views via templates.  The block interface
and url arguments control modules.  Each module has controller
scripts ( index, admin, etc).  These scripts call the business logic
in the classes.  Not MVC in strict defined way as in Struts or Ruby 
on Rails but just a description of how it works.

New block types.  Page, module, template. Other new block types are
not needed.  Module blocks can be called with a page argument to show
a new module's blocks.

A view argument changes output from html to any of the other rss,
xml etc outputs.  backend.php is not required for story feeds.  Other
modules would have to process the argument and are not implemented
yet.

Page layout controlled by the blocks assigned to the page.  Very
flexible in what is displayed in each section.  Different headers,
navbars, modules, etc.  Polls, About, Search, etc can have different
blocks than the home page.

Stories and blocks can contain {IMAGURL} and {ROOTURL}.  This is
pretty cool.  I think you had trouble implementing BE in a subdir and
the image link in the blocks.  Doesn't show up nicely in htmlarea but
works nicely.

The cvs config.php has this hostname config file setup where you can
host many sites off of one set of code.  Luis has one install with
different ini files, db's, templates and images for a few different
sites.  The others don't even have a home directory.  Just the apache 
vhost. I haven't explored this much myself yet.

Since everything is displayed through block output, there are some 
admin tasks that are easier now and don't require code changes.  
TopicBar, comments on or off per section, different tabs, navbars and 
ad server code per section,  About page can be inside the admin 
instead of in a template.  Location of breadcrumb and related 
links can be moved around.  Really a lot of flexibility.

Joe