Welcome

Wedeto is a modern PHP framework that is built on new functionalities in PHP7. It is a reliable, thoroughly tested MVC-framework that allows you to build web applications quick and easy.

Installation is a breeze

Wedeto is built around Composer and is therefore easy to install. Just run the following commands:

composer require wedeto/application
php vendor/bin/setup.php

This will install and setup Wedeto, while asking you some questions, and optionally configuring a database connection. Afterwards, you will end up with a http directory that should be served by your webserver. Of course, you will want to use a sercure, high-performance webserver for your production website. However, during development, the built-in PHP webserver may be useful. To try it out, just run:

php -S localhost:8000 http/index.php

Now, point your browser to http://localhost:8000/ and you will be greeted by Wedeto.

Getting started

Of course, you will want to do more than serving a Wedeto greeter page. To add your own page, you will need to add apps (controllers) and templates (views).

Wedeto doesn't use a router configuration. Instead, it uses the file system to route your request. Templates are stored in template directory of your Wedeto-root, and apps in app.

Go ahead and create a controller:

mkdir app
echo "<?php $tpl->setTemplate('test')->render();" > app/test.php

This very simple tiny controller does nothing else but define a route called test, and have that show the template called test. You can visit it: http://localhost:8000/test. Oops, an internal server error. After initial setup, Wedeto uses a development mode that shows you some background information. In this case, the template file is missing. That's right, we didn't create it yet. Let's do that now:

mkdir template
gedit template/test.php

You can of course substitute your favorite editor for 'gedit'. Put in the following contents:

<?php
$this->setTitle('WeDeTo - The Web Development Toolkit');
include tpl('parts/header.php');
?>
        <div class="small-12 columns callout">
            <h1>Hello World</h1>
            <p>
                Behold your new custom template
            <p>
        </div>
<?
include tpl('parts/footer.php');

Reload your page. You should now see the rendered template! As you can see, Wedeto uses PHP for its templates, rather than a templating engine. PHP is a templating engine itself, so why add another layer? Instead, Wedeto attempts to supply various utility functions that reduce the verbosity of several PHP functions that are often used in templates. For example, wrapping text in the txt function will escape it, like so: txt('<my text using >');. This is even better used with the short output tags in PHP, when outputting variables: <=txt($myvar)?>

Internationalization

There are also functions for translating, such as t('Translate me'), tn('Translate {amount} string', 'Translate {amount} strings', ['amount' => 3]), ore tl(['en' => 'Welcome', 'nl' => 'Welkom', 'de' => 'Wilkommen']);. The last variant doesn't even require you to create gettext-files, so it's easy to get started on internationalization. When you scale up, it's probably more efficient to use the gettext-system to separate your translations from your layout. In all cases, Wedeto will determine the appropriate language based on the headers the visitor's browser sends.

Combining parts

Now you've written your own app and template. Wedeto automatically scans and combines apps and templates from all installed modules. If you make a composer package out of your project and include it in another project, your controller will still be available in the new project. However, the new project can override it by defining its own controller with the same name.

That's it!

That's the basics of using Wedeto. Of course, there's a lot more to it. Wedeto includes a mailer, a database abstraction layer, various utility functions, formatting and escaping, and internationization. Documentation is still in the making. Check back soon for more information! Alternatively, if you can't wait, you can always check out the test suites coming with all the modules. Besides testing the code thoroughly, it also gives a good idea of how to use the software.