#Website Boilerplate

A website boilerplate based on the Slim Framework as well as a couple of useful Laravel Framework components, which are commonly required, when developing simple websites.

##Why?

As many frameworks provide quite a lot of components and features that seem to be overhead in small projects, I came up with using the Slim Framework.

It requires PHP 5.3 to run, so it should run on quite a broad range of web application servers with PHP installed on them.

After adding the components I require most of the time, I ended up with this little boilerplate project.

##Third party software

In addition to the Slim Micro Framework, the following components are included:

• PHP dotenv
• Laravel framework components from version 4.x, as these require PHP 5.3 only
  • IoC Container
  • Session
  • Database
• PHPMailer
• Sirius validation components
• Twig template engine

Also implementing features based on:

• Jeffrey Ways Laracasts Validation library

##Installation

For installation execute the following commands and replace demo by your own application name

git clone https://github.com/remluben/slim-boilerplate.git demo
cd demo
composer update

##Docs

###Configuration

The application can be easily configured using the app/config/config.php file.

There are defined a couple of configuration values by default. They can be changed as described and new configuration values may be added as required.

The configuration object is available as as $config inside routes.php and can be injected into Controllers by using the \App\Components\Config\Config $config parameter.

####Environment based configuration

Within the application base directory exists a .env.example file, which can be used for environment based configuration.

Simply rename the file to .env and adjust the settings. Settings are read from within app/config/config.php using PHP's getenv() function.

For further information see: https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv

####Database

There are default MSQL database credentials provided within the app/config/config.php file as a fallback for development systems.

host: localhost
database: development
username: user
password: password

###Dependency Injection

The website boilerplate makes use of Laravel's IoC (Inversion of Control) component, which allows automatic dependency injection of Controller constructor parameters.

Let's take a look at the HomeController, that comes with the application by default:

class HomeController extends BaseController
{
    /**
     * @var \Slim\Slim
     */
    private $app;

    public function __construct(\Slim\Slim $app) // automatically provided by Laravel's IoC container
    {
        $this->app = $app;
    }

    /**
     * Show the home page
     */
    public function indexAction()
    {
        $this->app->render('home.twig');
    }
}

Note, that it is possible to automatically load any resource from the IoC container, that is registered. You can see how this works in app/bootstrap/bootstrap.php.

Further information can be found at http://laravel.com/docs/4.1/ioc

###Routing

A simple router class as a wrapper for the Slim\Slim application class is available within the routes.php file as $router.

It provides a simple way to add controller based routing:

// The base namespace \App\Http\Controllers\ is set within the app/boilerplate/boilerplate.php file
// \App\Http\Controllers\HomeController
$router->get('/home', 'HomeController::index');

// A simple Slim route using the Router component
$router->get('/test/:something', function ($something) {
    echo htmlspecialchars($something);
});

###Database

The Laravel database component can be easily injected into Controllers:

class ExampleController extends BaseController
{
    /**
     * @var \Slim\Slim
     */
    private $app;

    /**
     * @var \Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager
     */
    private $db;

    public function __construct(
        \Slim\Slim $app,
        \Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager $db
    ) {
        $this->app = $app;
        $this->db = $db;
    }

    /**
     * Show the home page
     */
    public function indexAction()
    {
        $this->app->render('home.twig');
    }
}

For further information on how to use the database object see https://github.com/laravel/docs/blob/4.1/database.md

##Roadmap

• Bower and Gulp integration