Willowgarden DP 2 review

Willowgarden project is a PHP 5 rapid development platform for that provides an extensible environment for developing Web sites featu

License: BSD License File size: 816K Developer: Jared White

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Willowgarden project is a PHP 5 rapid development platform for that provides an extensible environment for developing Web sites featuring support for pretty REST-style URLs, easy security, observable events, a simple object-based "code + view" rendering system, ActiveRecord-style data access, built-in client/server Ajax, and more.

Application Settings

The application.xml file is comprised of various settings grouped by deployment mode (and you can import settings from one deployment mode to another). Each setting is defined via a define tag with the key attribute being the setting key and the tag contents being the value. So edit the application.xml file like so:

Change rootURL to the base Web address of your application. This is the URL you need to type into your Web browser in order to access the folder (so don't include "index.php" or anything like that).

By default, the index.php file is used for routing all requests through a front controller. If you want to make use of pretty URLs (i. e., you never actually see index.php in the URL), comment out the frontControllerFile setting and rename htaccess.sample in the application folder to .htaccess (you'll need Apache's mod_rewrite turned on for this to work).

NOTE: without the .htaccess file denying access to the config folder and other code folders, you'll have a huge security hole (i. e., anyone can read the XML config files and see settings, passwords, etc. right in the browser).

For app skeletons, you can change the appName setting to something else as well.

Now edit the index.php file in the main app folder. You'll see that require_once statement I mentioned earlier; change it if necessary so it loads the core/Willowgarden.php file from the right folder.

OK, if the app isn't yet using a database, this is all you need to do to get Willowgarden up and running! Go to your Web browser, type in the base Web address, and you should see the home page in all its glory. If you get an error of some kind, verify that your rootURL and frontControllerFile settings are the way you want them and that index.php is including the right Willowgarden.php file. If you still have errors, please let us know in our community forums.

Database Settings

If the app does need to use a database, and most apps do, then go back to the config folder (and rename database.xml.sample to database.xml if need be). Edit database.xml as follows:

The type setting is the type of database to use. Only "mysql" is supported currently.
The server setting is the server name to use (usually "localhost").
The username and password settings are your login credentials for accessing the database.
The name setting is the name of the logical database containing the tables you need to access.

Willowgarden apps don't yet have a mechanism to set up tables and import database rows during installation, so you may have to import .sql files manually before the app will work (you need to do this for the shopping cart demo, for instance).