Following along the MVC courses on Udemy.com by Dave Hollingworth daveh.io.
- Git clone the public HTTPS. Remove the .git directory if you want a standalone project. Run
git initto create your own git repo. - Run
composer install. - Edit the routes on
public/index.phpto match your own Controllers and actions.
The Models, Views, and Controllers can be found in the App sub-directory, which is the class namespace for all classes saved here. These classes are auto-loaded via PSR-4 in composer.json. Classes are named in StudlyCaps.
The Auth, Config, Flash, Mail, and Token classes can also be found in the App namespace. These classes add functionality such as creating cookies, storing database credentials, saving error messages to $_SESSION variables, connecting with the Mailgun API, and creating token hashes.
Model files written in PHP are used in the Controllers to validate form data, make database connections, and prepare/bind/execute queries. This keeps SQL queries out of other scripts and presentation code. The PHP Data Object (PDO) is used, which is useful at the least because it auto-escapes queries.
The Views sub-directories organize the HTML template files that create the website front-end. All templates inherit from the base template. Additionally, there are templates for 404 and 500 HTTP status codes, which are semt from the Core\Error class using http_response_code($code).
The main View subdirectories are listed here.
- Admin Work-in-progress
- Home Home page
- Posts View all posts
- Profile Private view for logged-in user
- Signup Create a new user record
- Password Reset a forgotten password
Templates are rendered using renderTemplate method of the Twig 3.0 templating engine.
Controllers are classes which extend either the Core\Controller class, or for private pages, the Authenticated class. Controllers have a number of methods which are called actions. Controllers, actions, and optional information (such as post ID's) are pulled from dispatching routes; e.g., http://localhost/posts/123/open
The Core classes are used to extend App Controllers and Models. These are contained in the Core subdirectory, which is also the namespace, and loaded via PSR-4 in composer.json.
This core Controller is the parent of all controllers. It has two magic methods __call and __construct which deal with creating new objects from the Router. It also has a method to redirect and restrict URLs.
The Error class has methods to deal with both errors and exceptions. Depending on the settings in the App/Config file, it will either display or log an error when something goes wrong on the site.
The core Model class has a common, static method to make a database connection. The database connection gets cached.
The core Router class accepts routes from the front controller, index.php, and adds them to the routing table. It also has supplementary methods to convert the URL to StudlyCaps or camelCase, get the namespace, remove query string variables, and more, all of which get used when dispatching the URL in the front controller.
The core View class is what interfaces with the Twig templating engine. The getTemplate method loads the Twig environment, and the renderTemplate method takes it one step further by echoing that template.