Chameleon Framework

Basic informations about framework

Architecture

Chameleon framework use principes of standard Model-View-Controller model, known as MVC model. Therefore, system is divided into 3 basic parts:

• Model - which represent data storage and operations with them.
• Template - represent View from MVC model, works mostly with client-side HTML, CSS a JS and use them to show data as web page.
• Controller - controls interaction between user and system, load and save data from Model and puts them to Template, where they are viewed to user as response.

Here you can see base concept of framework, using 3 basic parts of MVC, and some others, which are equally important, are described bellow picture.

In Chameleon framework model, View represents main class, which is reponsible for process request either from user or from itself. View than response with HTML page. Class Text act here as text database, which stores most text packages for web page.

File structure

Framework data are structured into folders as following (mentioned will be also important files):

• application/ - application data
  • controllers/ - controller classes for every page
  • libraries/ - user defined classes
  • models/ - implementation of data model classes
  • texts/ - text packages
  • views/ - html/php documents for every page, worked out in templates
  • start.php - script called before starting of first view processing with basic setup
• config/ - configuration files
• extern/ - external plugins and packages used by framework
• library/ - main source of build-in scripts
  • bootstrap.php - first script file called in processing, including all necessary files
  • shared.php - make basic preparations to correct run of framework
• public/ - this folder will be accessed by user. Contents all files used by page, such as CSS and JS files, images etc.
• scripts/ - framework scripts called manually to execute actions
  • dbcreate.php - create DB structure based on files in schema/
• schema/ - schemas for every table in database on which is generated structure of database
• tmp/ - folder for temporary files

Mostly, you will be interested into files in application/ and also page files in public/ folder for styling, JS scripting etc.

Functionalities

Framework offers possibilities to speed up programming in many areas, such as work with data types, creating html structures like tables, forms, links, simplify work with post or session data or provide validation class for input from user. There are also classes for realize requests to MySQL database which saves much time of writing request. Interesting part of framework is text packages, which allows to divide text by languages and store them separately from HTML code. Some commands for more effective work with HTML was also added. They can used dicrectly in HTML, because framework has also its own HTML parser. At last, there are specific classes realising shoping cart, sending emails or simplify data storage actions and new parts are still being added.

Plugins

We are also working on creating plugins which helps generate front- and back-end of pages or provide some specific functions and views like pop-up windows, paging etc. The most interesting plugin we are working on is back-end administration for managing basic settings of page and content of database. These plugin provides wizard for generation of administration pages for every data. So creating basic administration such as CMS is now more simple with few clicks. Plugin contains build in text-editors, gallery controllers etc.

Updates

Special part of administration plugin is functionality to update framework libraries and other plugins to newest version with one click. These files can be regularly downloaded by one click to your server.

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