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PVC (Page-View-Controller) is a module for ProcessWire CMF (2.4+) that brings MVC’ish code organisation to ProcessWire templates.

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PvcCore

Introduction

ProcessWire is a great CMS/CMF that is comfortable to use and manage. Coders as well as designers especially love the fact that PW gives you a maximum of freedom when it comes to structuring and coding your templates. But also it is this freedom that makes every single one of us come up with her or his completely own style how to deal with files, separation of data, logic and presentation.

PVC stands for Page-View-Controller. Pages in PW are considered data containers which’s structure is defined by templates and field definitions. PVC considers PW’s pages a resource’s data (or kind of model) layer and adds a view and a controller layer.

By doing this PVC gives you a clear structure to organize your code. Controllers keep your business logic and let you decorate your page’s data and present it all to the page’s view. Views for example let you define helpers to deal with presentation efficiently.

But PVC brings you much more, you’ll love. Like action routes and the possibility to use (and write) template renderers (e.g. for Twig syntax). So dive in and explore!

Installation

PvcCore installs all necessary files and sets up PVC folder structure in your site/templates/ directory. Also it comes with PvcRendererNative, the basic renderer which let you write templates the good old PHP way.

To install PvcCore, copy the Pvc folder to your site/modules/ directory and install the module through the ProcessWire module interface.

After installation you’ll find some new folders in your site/templates/ directory.

Folders and Files

Folder structure

  • assets Where your scripts, styles and images are kept
    • images
    • scripts
    • styles
  • controllers Controller files go here
  • layouts Layout files contain the outer document structure pages share
  • snippets Chunks of code you can use within your templates
  • views View files and templates go here
    • home Each PW template gets its own view folder to keep a template for each action

Base Files and Examples

Within the new folder structure you’ll find a few files.

  • site/templates/controllers/base.controller.php contains the BaseController class. It extends PvcController class. Here you can add general business logic that you want to apply to all the controllers you’ll build. Like defining script or style assets. Make sure to all your future controllers extend BaseController.
  • site/templates/controllers/home.controller.php is an example controller which deals with business logic for pages with template home.
  • site/templates/views/base.view.php contains the BaseView class. It extends PvcView and if you needed for example some custom view helpers, you’d define them here. Future view classes extend BaseView.
  • site/templates/views/home/index.tmpl.php is an action template. As index is the default action of each controller, there has to be a template for it for each PW template.
  • site/templates/layouts/default.tmpl.php is the default layout in which’s outlet your action templates will be rendered.

How it works

ProcessWire processes a page view through its ProcessPageView_ module which then calls render() method on the page to be rendered. The render() method itself is a method hook provided to Page objects through the PageRender module. PVC hooks into this process and makes PW initiate a PvcView object (with its corresponding PvcController object attached to it) instead of a TemplateFile. From there on PVC takes care of the template processing.

View

Each PW template gets an individual view class that inherits from BaseView and/or PvcView class. Its name is determined by the template’s name. So template home’s view class is named HomeView. PVC looks up the class within the views folder. For template home it would look for site/templates/views/home.view.php. If the class can’t be found, it is generated on the fly. View classes are instanciated with a controller passed in.

View Helpers

View helpers are functions that are made available as global functions within your action template context. As they are created from closures, they can be allowed to have access to the current scope. They can be quite handy tools to abstract view layer logic.

How are they defined?

How to deal with inheritance?

Controller

Each view gets an individual controller class that inherits from BaseController and/or PvcController class. Its name is determined by the template’s name. So template home’s controller class is named HomeController. PVC looks up the class within the controllers folder. For template home it would look for site/templates/controllers/home.controller.php. If the class can’t be found, it is generated on the fly, too.

Actions

By default when you access a page via its url, its controller executes the index action. But imagine the case you have an article template and you provide a comment form. Now you can enable urlSegments for this template and define an action named comment. To do so you just add a public method to your ArticleController class. It will be executed as soon as you access the page with the segment /comment/ attached to its URL. If you have multiple segments like /comment/list/, the action method would be called commentList.

Action Routes

More interesting is, that you can wire particular patterns of URL segments to your actions and use dynamic parts as input. For example, if you want an action to be able to delete a comment, you’ll need the comment’s id within the action method. In PVC this is done via action routes that you can define within your controllers init() method like this:

class ArticleController extends BaseController {

  public function init() {
    $this->route('/delete/:id/', array('id'=>'^[0-9]+$'), 'delete');
  }

}

You pass the segment pattern into the controllers route() method as the first argument. Second argument is an associative array that contains a regular expression to validate each dynamic segment. The third argument is the name of the action method you want to call when the route is accessed. All dynamic segments will be extracted and made available within your action method through $this->input->route.

Action Templates

Each action defined in a controller requires a template to be rendered. Like the HomeController’s index action template is found in site/templates/views/home/index.tmpl.php, an action edit would need a template site/templates/views/home/edit.tmpl.php.

Renderers

Renderers are provided to PVC as separate modules which implement a special interface to interact with the view while preparing rendering process. It’s the idea to allow implementing alternative template syntaxes by installing or developing other renderers.

Native Renderer

Renderer API

Describe API, give an idea how to implement own renderers.

The Future

  • Maybe encapsulated template outlets to render actions within the template’s index action template?
  • More renderers. Which one?

About

PVC (Page-View-Controller) is a module for ProcessWire CMF (2.4+) that brings MVC’ish code organisation to ProcessWire templates.

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