The Luthier content management framework is a collection of modules for adding an administrative layer to a Kohana application. Since, by itself, Luthier does not actually do anything and requires additional code to be developed in order for an admin area to work, Luthier is more like a framework than a stand-alone module. In this sense, it is a framework on top of the Kohana framework.
Luthier is extremely modular and broken up into several Kohana modules. Each module (except for the luthier-core module) is referred to as a “Luthier extension”. These are not user/plug-and-play extensions, but rather extensions that developers must piece together to create an administration layer (in the same way that Kohana modules are used). Note that it would be possible for a plugin extension to be developed that would allow user-enabled plugins--but such functionality is not provided at this point in time.
The luthier-core module is the base of Luthier, providing core libraries and views used by all Luthier extensions. Modules like luthier-blog and luthier-comments provide complete functionality (such as blog post management and comments management). Other modules provide libraries used by other Luthier extensions, such as luthier-stats and luthier-markitup.
Luthier uses Kostache for all views. This allows for easy overriding of templates to provide different themes. Without a theme extension enabled, Luthier will render as plain HTML. The luthier-theme-davies theme uses Colonel-Rosa’s admin-template theme. Hopefully more themes will be developed to allow more theming options.
Each Luthier extension can have any number of interdependencies with other Luthier extensions and external dependencies with other Kohana modules. These dependencies will be listed in the documentation for each extension.
External dependencies of the luthier-core module are:
- Kohana 3.1
- Kostache
To being using Luthier, see the userguide or demo application.
See the developer's guide in the included userguide.