Lasagna code is better than spaghetti code

Starter code to make a web app in an organised way using regular procedural PHP (without a framework).

MVC as a way to organise code, not a framework

Lasagna is not a framework. It's a set of files to begin a project with which you can edit and expand as required.

Lasagna uses the MVC pattern.

Installation

Copy the files and folders of the repository folder into your document root (htdocs or whatever). Once copied, your directory structure should look like this:

htdocs/
    example.php
    lasagna/
        html/
            example.tpl
        sql/
            example_table.php
        view.php
    README.md

Delete README.md, you probably don't want it.

Then use the example files as a basis for your own model, view and controller files, or delete them too and read on.

Writing controller and view files

Within controller files, call \view\display() to display the view. If the first parameter ($path) is not specified, this will look for a matching .tpl file inside html/. For example, if the controller file is here:

htdocs/
    feed/
        rss.php

The \view\display() function will look for and display:

htdocs/
    lasagna/
        html/
            feed/
                rss.tpl

Values are passed to the view file either using \view\set() or passing an associative array as the second parameter to \view\display(). For example, using the \view\set() function:

\view\set('title', 'More power to us!');

Alternatively, passing the values via \view\display(),

\view\display($path, array('title' => 'More power to us!'));

History

Lasagna was made for programming students for whom PHP, SQL, HTML and CSS are new. It provides a way to organise files in a web project (MVC is good for this) without having to learn a framework.

Philosophy

• Include the minimum code to get started with MVC (helper functions, etc can be added as required)
• Include as little code as possible so looking under the hood isn't scary
• Make it procedural (not everyone knows about classes)
• Use namespaces to clearly demarcate this code from the standard PHP libraries
• Using try-catch isn't justified when most of the standard libraries don't use it
• Using a template engine for the views would be good, but when you're still confusing HTML and PHP, functions and variables… this can wait
• No configuration
• Easy setup (copy and paste files)

To do

• Document functions
• Replace global var in view.php with Singleton?
• .htaccess to hide lasagna/ dir