Taking the Sting Out of PHP 5 Programming

bfioca writes "Where are the all-in-one PHP frameworks that make building well-factored and maintainable applications as easy as building simple sites? O'Reilly ONLamp's recent article Simplify PHP Development with WASP shows how to make a simple database-backed site with WASP in just a few lines of code. Other PHP 5 frameworks such as symfony and PRADO have been getting a lot of recent attention as well."

Drupal?

[rjung2k]

I don't claim to be a web architecture guru, but what's wrong with Drupal? [drupal.org] Open source, PHP 5-friendly, and does everything from vanity sites to corporate sites.

Re:Drupal?

[carndearg]

Drupal is a content management framework, these are application frameworks. In other words Drupal is the application and once you've installed it and whatever modules you need all you have to do is input your content while an application framework requires you to use it to write an application before you can think of content. Drupal is very useful if you want to do what it or one of its modules already does but it is less flexible for custom applications.

Re:Drupal?

[arivanov]

Looking at the frequency of attempted exploits for drupal holes on my website there is a lot wrong with it (I do not even have PHP installed). At least from security perspective.

Re:I don't see the magic words MVC...

[Nigel182]

Quick note: WASP does use the MVC paradigm. Here's a link to the MVC portion of the sample application tutorial. http://wasp.sourceforge.net/content/?q=node/7#Mode l.2C_Views.2C_and_Controllers [sourceforge.net]

Re:Drupal?

[truthsearch]

No, it takes no hacking to work multisite. I'm running 3 sites on one code base right now. The URLs are very short. There's nothing horrible about them. And if you turn on the right module you can automatically link to /title/page+title. Learn about an app before complaining about it.

Re:I need PHP

[hazah]

Look, unless you are able to at least glue these components with SOME code, you aren't going to get anywhere. Just forget about it, because such an elaborate GUI does NOT exist. GUI isn't your solution either, since you don't understand the fundamentals of the problems you are trying to solve. Sorry, but you're either going to have to hit the books, or pay/convince someone else to do this for you.

Re:I need PHP

[Magic5Ball]

Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver has *limited* support for what you describe (table views [kind of], forms, db updates, page layout, and maybe cookies). You still won't be able to design digg.com with zero understanding of how PHP and web apps work though, regardless of how good the tool is.

Also, your understanding of databases and interfaces needs to be more sophisticated than building a contact manager in MS Access...

Never ever use PHPNuke

[NoSuchGuy]

Bad security by default.
Read here. [google.com]

Re:*Please* use Ruby or Python

[Parham]

This is the one point I have to agree with. PHP has great documentation (with loads of comments). I had to learn Python in school and to this day I still can't browse around the documentation properly without getting frustrated. Python is a great language, it enforces great structure and readability, but the docs for it are incredibly annoying.

Re:Drupal?

[kbahey]

You probably saw scans for the old versions of xmlrpc.

This was a third party library that we incorporated in Drupal a while back to do some remote stuff (e.g. remote blogging, ...etc.)

If you do not use third party client apps to post, you can delete the file xmplrpc.php altogether if you wish.

When it was discovered that it has security flaws, we replaced it completely.

Newer versions are as secure as they can be.

Re:Drupal?

[kbahey]

Disclaimer: I am a Drupal community member and developer.

I think you have to hack it to get it to work multisite?

Nope.

Drupal has multi site out of the box, and has been like that for years. For some 18 months, I ran 4 different domain out of the same code base and the same database even (with database prefixes).

Also, the URLs are pretty horrible.

Drupal boasts "clean URLs" out of the box as well. This means that urls do not have to be www.example.com?q=node/123 but rather www.example.com/node/123 (this requires mod_rewrite).

Moreover, Drupal has out of the box the path module which allows you to alias any page to any URL you like. There is also a contributed module (pathauto) that makes this totally automated.

Check my web site for examples (all URLs are aliased).