Introduction

xSiteable is a (yet another) PHP framework that tries it hardest to be simple, understandable, extensible, modern and flexible. It encompasses certain paradigms and technologies ;

• event-driven; all class instances and their methods are driven by a structured event-stack, guaranteeing that every part of the framework is extensible, overridable, and fixable.
• Everything is pluggable; all classes hooks into the event-stack as plugins, modules, widgets and actions. If it doesn't plug in, you're doing it wrong.
• fully object-oriented and relying on PHP 5.3+ to make sure we don't spend a lot of time and code on past mistakes
• topic-maps; a semantic technology for easily working with complex structures and meta data, and persistent identification management, and also makes parts of the framework ontology aware
• a variation over the Model-View-Controller paradigm with more intuitive action classes
• REST; embracing HTTP and resource-orientation as a way to leverage flexibility and scalability
• HTML5 using the HTML5 Boilerplate templates as a base
• JQuery and JQuery UI as a base for JavaScripting
• XSLT for the best functional kick-ass templating out there

The framework is fairly light-weight even though it encompasses a fair few concepts, and it does this through putting some of these concepts at the core of the design. Event-driven programming isn't tacked on as an after-thought; it is right there in the middle, guiding both the style and flexibility of development.

For a more direct application design perspective, look at the anatomy of an application. Otherwise, have a look at the conceptual ideas and the design sections which contains many examples, but just to get a feel for it, here's an example of a plugin, a Twitter widget, in its entirety. It uses the Twitter JS framework to appear in a widget window;

class xs_widget_twitter extends xs_Action_Widget {

    public $meta = array(
        'name' => 'Twitter widget',
        'description' => 'Twitter Widget',
        'version' => '1.0',
        'author' => 'Joe Blow',
        'author_link' => 'http://www.bongo.net/',
    );

    public $properties = array (
        'title' => 'CEO Twitter Feed',
        'style' => 'min-height:300px;',
        'class' => 'color-blue',
    ) ;

    function GET_content () {
        return $this->prepare (
           '<div style="font-size:0.9em;padding-top:10px;text-align:center">
            <script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
            <script>
            new TWTR.Widget({
              version: 2, type: "profile", rpp: 4, interval: 6000, width: "auto", height: 300,
              theme: {
                shell: { background: "#5c9ccc", color: "#ffffff" },
                tweets: { background: "#000000", color: "#ffffff", links: "#4aed05" }
              },
              features: { scrollbar: false, loop: false, live: false, hashtags: true,
                timestamp: true, avatars: false, behavior: "all"
              }
            }).render().setUser("shelterit").start();
            </script></div>' 
        ) ;
    }   
}

Quick explanation: The $meta properties are handy meta data about the plugin itself, while $properties are properties of the widget itself, in this case its title, how tall it should be as a minimum, and what class to attach to it (in this case, one that controls its color to be blue). The method GET_content() returns widget content on a RESTful GET of the widget controller, and plops it into a widget window. Easy, peasy.