jeff.mariten.com

jeff-www is a small PHP/Smarty system that powers my personal website About Jeff Case

Features

Technologies Used

• PHP 5.4 🐘
• Smarty 2
• Apache 2.2
• Page design and CSS derived from Verti by HTML5 UP
  • Utilizes Skel JS and Font Awesome for social button glyphs

Photos via Flickr API

Performs parallel HTTP (via CURL) queries at the Flickr API to select photos for display from my primary Flickr albums

• Fetches metadata for a Flickr photoset and picks a single random photo from one or more target albums
• Selected photos must meet certain conditions such as:
  • To ensure visual symmatery across the site, each photo must be a 4x3 landscape shot
  • Each photo must have been taken in a different state/prefecture as all of the other randomly selected photos
  • If the photo is geotagged, include a link to a map showing the location where it was shot
• Display photos asynchronously (via "lazy-load") to speed up the first-view of each page where these appear
• Perform queries to Flickr API in parallel using the curl_multi wrapper
• Cache raw results from Flickr API for 24 hours, as my Flickr photosets are not updated more than once a day

Soft Rewrite Rules

All processing of the URL path and subsequent rewrite rules are handled by the top-level index.php, with just a few Apache-side rewrite rules. This rule imply forwards the entire URL path and query string to PHP, where parsing and validation can be handled more programatically.

Simple MVC

Top-level controller handles all page requests and based on URL path (passed as url_path) decides which page controller to employ.

The layers are constructed as follows:

• Model: Classes to directly interact with APIs and extract data from results. Static data registries are also stored here.
• Controller: Fetches and arranges data from the relevant models for a given page, assigns all relevant variables to Smarty template, and then lastly displays said template
• View: Actual Smarty template made up mostly of HTML, comprised of multiple reusable parts

Setup

1. Ensure that temp file directories exist and are writable by the web server
   • tmp/template_c - where compiled Smarty templates live
   • tmp/cache - where API responses from curl_multi are cached as JSON
2. For Flickr API calls, manually set the API key in the Flickr config file
3. Point the DocumentRoot for Apache to the www folder - index.php in that folder handles all requests

Credits

• Thanks to @ajlkn for the great design skeletons at http://html5up.net