XMLSite is a PHP sample site as a starter base framework for simple website projects. It uses XML documents to store data contents as a code based CMS, which makes it easy for developers to manage and versioning with git.
- Clean URLs (user-friendly).
- Simple and direct template system to reuse code passing variables.
- Data contents stored in XML documents, easier to manage with git and synchronize between servers.
- Simplified MVC pattern starting with a single file as a global controller and custom API.
- Customizable settings, initialization and routing.
- Really fast! Simple to set-up, fast developing, high performance for few data.
- If you need users and access management.
- For large amounts of data.
- The project is not that simple.
The code comes with an example website. Use it as a reference guide to develop yours. Just delete and change whatever you need within the app and the assets folder. But don't delete app/init.php neither app/data/config/site_settings.xml!
At a first level there is the core directory and index.php which manage and process all requests as the starting point. There is also app directory which contains all the customization, starting in init.php, and it contains all XML data and template system.
Inside core:
- init.php: Where all starts, it declares path constants and requires other files.
- api.php: Common functions to use elsewhere.
- data_manager: Necessary data managing functions that need to be loaded on every request.
Inside app:
- data: XML data documents, and HTML files for pieces of content (i.e. articles). There are two sub-directories: config (with a required site_settings.xml file) to place your configuration data, and content, to place your content data.
- pages: The .php files associated to pages, for example pages/contact.php it's loaded by default for the example.com/contact url.
- templates: The pieces of HTML code to include thorough the pages. You may also create page or teaser templates for dynamic entity data in subfolders like catalog/product-id.
In vendor we place here third-party software like SimpleDOM.php, used to manage XML data. In the directory assets you can place all the web files like css, js, images, etc. assets is optional, you can rename it or place those assets in another level.
I originally developed XMLSite as a solution for Jazztel Spanish telecom. They had a multisite wordpress where every site was a different landing within the same domain with almost the same data, except some contact data and analytics code. Frontend developers maintained the code and also the content changes, which was a real pain replicating those changes in all sites. The inherited wordpress had been hardcoded and wasn't well built, but the key point was: we don't really need a cms with no users, except developers, and there weren't large amounts of data.
So I came up with this solution which my fronted colleagues really appreciated, they could just do the front stuff and change the data in the xml files; all versioned in the git repository, and move it through development and production enviroment servers just with a git pull. Faster than ever.
Since then I've used this super simple CMS for other quick small websites. That is how I developed the improved and better structured 2.x version.