SIFO Overview

SIFO is a well-proben open source PHP5 framework currently running on several sites, from small installations to large websites with multiple servers.

SIFO is free and very easy to use. Contains a lot of libraries and classes that allow you to get your projects running in a breeze.

You can download the code from both [Github] GH or [Google Code] GC

Architecture

In this section we will describe a little bit the architecture of SIFO.

MVC pattern

SIFO uses the MVC pattern to sepparate your project in 3 different areas:

• Models: Contain the bussiness logic. Where all the data is taken from (e.g: Queries to database)
• Views: HTML templates with a little bit of logic such as iterations. It's just the presentation of your web. Smarty by default.
• Controllers: The ones that put it all together with any necessary logic.

If you never used this pattern before, you should start now if you don't want to become insane once your applications start to grow. Don't feel overwhelmed, it's easy.

Multiple environments

Via a single file, the mighty config/domains.config.php, you set-up your application. In this file you declare the domains your application will listen to and set the configuration for each one of them. For instance, if you want to code the webpage http://sifo.me you might want to set at least 2 domains: The real production domain sifo.me and a fake one for local development sifo.local

In the config/domains.config.php you can set up things like:

• Show/hide the debug (devel flag)
• Languages accepted by your application
• Credentials to several services, init commands, master/slave configurations (e.g: mysql)
• Related hostnames, error reporting and other specific PHP tasks.

Portion of the file:

$config['sifo.me'] = array(
	'devel' => false, // No debug in production.
	'instance' => 'sifoweb',
	'language' => 'en_US',
	'database' => array(
		'profile' => 'PRODUCTION' // Master/slave profiled taken from db_profiles.config.php.
		'db_driver' => 'mysqli',
		'db_host' => '127.0.0.1',
		'db_user' => 'root',
		'db_password' => 'root',
		'db_name' => 'mydatabase',
		'db_init_commands' => array( 'SET NAMES utf8' )
	),
	/*  REDIS syntax:
	'database' => array(
		'database' => array(
		'host'     => '127.0.0.1',
		'port'     => 6379,
		'database' => 0
	*/
	),
	'php_ini_sets' => array( // Empty array if don't want changes.
		// Log errors to 'logs' folder:
		'log_errors' => 'On',
		'error_log' => ROOT_PATH . '/logs/sifoweb_errors.log',
	),
	'libraries_profile' => 'stable_libraries'
	);

	$config['sifo.local'] = $config['sifo.me']; // Take all the config from production
	// Redefine some vars for local domain:
	$config['sifo.local']['devel'] = true;
	$config['sifo.local']['static_host'] = 'http://static.sifo.local';
	$config['libraries_profile'] = 'unstable_libraries'

Routing

When you type an URL there is a mapping between what you are typing in the address bar and the controller that should reply to that request. Is what we call the router and is located under config/router.config.php. If your application has urls translated you can also use the router_xx_XX.config.php files, where the xx_XX is the language and country code of your app. SIFO supports as much languages as you need.

Powerful Debug

The SIFO debug contains a lot of interesting stuff to debug your application:

• Benchmark: Full decomposition and analysis of times of execution per file and method
• Parameters that every Controller received
• Variables every template received (smarty)
• Queries launched to the database
  • Automatic commenting of the queries
  • Nice print of the final SQL launched
  • Different coloring for write/read operations, with times
  • Slow query alert
  • Printed recordset returned in tabular data
  • Host, database, and replica the query went in
• Data stored in Session (and kill session)
• Data stored in user Cookies
• Cache control (names of the keys, remaining TTL...)
• Sphinx Debug
• Cache invalidation
  • AUTOMATIC: While browsing
  • Manual: By flag

Multilanguage

Almost every SIFO programmer has multi-lingual projects, because it is very easy. We even have translation tools based on config files or in database, so you can pass the URLs to your non-programmers colleagues the URLs for proper translation.

All the smarty templates come with the i18n plugins that allow you to write your files in a single language. Example: If we had an application with three possible languages, we could have in the template something like:

<h1>{t 1=$username}Hello %1, welcome back!{/t}</h1>

This code would produce a different output depending on the current active language:

<h1>Hello John, welcome back!</h1>
<h1>Hola Juan, bienvenido de nuevo!</h1>
<h1>Hola Joan, benvingut de nou!</h1>

Your application languages are set on the config/domains.config.php file.

Sometimes we've been asked, yes, there is support for non-latin alphabets. We do have several installations in Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew... so yes, and also design with RTL text.

### Lazy loading ### The less classes are in-memory, the better. We stick to the principle of loading the classe only if they are going to be used. The configuration file config/libraries.config.php defines what classes are loaded per execution, and what versions of the libraries do you use. You can even create several profiles of libraries: maybe you want to play with the latest unstable library in local, while keeping the stable one in production.

Example:

$config['classes_always_preloaded'] = array(
	'Exceptions',
	'Registry',
	'Cache',
	'CantLiveWithoutThisClass'
);

// Contains all the libraries available.
$config['default'] = array(
	'mylibrary' => 'Mylibrary-1.5-stable'
);
$config['bleeding_edge_insane'] = array(
	'mylibrary' => 'Mylibrary-2.0alpha-unstable'
);

At execution time you can always load any needed application via the $this->getClass( 'ClassName' ) function in any point of the code, or if it's going to be loaded for sure include it in a protected var:

// Include the Filter class before the Controller is actually executed:
protected $include_classes = array( 'Filter' );

Multiple databases flavour

From Key-values like Redis to Oracle, Mysql, Postgres, Firebird or even SQLite. You can choose to use Mysql PDO or any of the ADODB drivers. For redis, Predis is an excellent solution.

Static files sepparation

You never know what is going to happen. Sepparate your static files in a different host is always a win-win.

Lots of helpful classes

Many projects share the same needs. Do you need to send nice emails? Geolocalise the users? Facebook/Youtube/Twitter integration? Quick searches using Sphinx? Upload files to Amazon S3? Do not reinvent the wheel, invest your time in something else.

Extendable

What would be the framework if you couldn't add our own classes and libraries? There is room for entire libraries, simple classes or helpers. Before coding something from scratch, ensure there is not something done already.

Command Line support

Yes, you like to code your cron jobs in PHP, so do we. Take profit of your existing models. Create your scripts extending from the Command Line. The CLI tool lets you define the supported parameters of the script and automatically builds the help for you. If you are interested in receiveing email reporting is also already done.

And many more

I am just tired of writing, is late night and I think you read enough. If you arrived here it's time to get a little bit deeper yourself guided by the documentation.