Xplosion 0.4.1 review

There are a lot of web site or portal engines out there

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Thanos Kyritsis

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There are a lot of web site or portal engines out there. But the problem with most of them is that they are either too complicated for a web developer to modify, or their API code is mixed up with HTML, which makes it just as ugly to customize.

This "Yet Another Engine" tries to innovate by using technologies that are not yet mainstream in web development, like the PEAR Flexy Template engine and other PEAR libraries.

Xplosion is the result of years' development on the http://www.linux.gr custom portal as well as setting up and modifying sites using the PHP-Nuke: Web Portal System.

Xplosion's purpose is to be as simple as possible while providing web developers with easy installation and building of their own content, design, and application logic. It avoids complexity to make it easier for a Web developer to modify it. It also avoids mixing the API code with XHTML to encourage clean design.

Also, as it gets developed and evolved, it will provide a wider set of default Blocks for those that only need to launch a portal in just a few secs, *BUT* special emphasis will be given in order to minimize the overhead and effort required to upgrade from an older engine version to a newer, as new versions get released.

This fact still requires lots of design and development and is the greater wish feature for when we reach a stable and robust release.

Xplosion is free software released under the GNU/GPL license.

Here are some key features of "Xplosion":
Object-Oriented and Modular Design
As much clean code as possible
Versatile API for expanding via Blocks
Use of PEAR Flexy Template API
PHP Application Logic and XHTML/CSS presentation code are not mixed up
Easy to modify the default theme or build a new one
Database Connection via PEAR DB API
Extendible Multi-Language System via PEAR Translation2
Unicode Support
Multi-User Support
Easy and Simple Installation Procedure

Requirements:
PHP 4.3.x or 4.4.x
PEAR DB 1.7.6
PEAR HTML_Template_Flexy 1.2.2
PEAR Auth 1.2.3
PEAR Translation 2.0.0beta8
PEAR Auth_PrefManager 1.1.4
MySQL Database Server

What's New in This Release:
add: API documentation (phpdocumentor format comments in the source code)
fix: correct errors regarding XHTML validity