Pixelinx Framework Open Source PHP Framework

About

About the Author

Hi, I'm Adam Pancutt. And I'm a web developer. From London. In England. Good.

I started my walk through the web development jungle at a ripe young age of around 14. I remember the days back in '98 where MS Word's Export as HTML feature was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I could change what appeared on my screen. I could change the colour of text on the Internet. I knew that FTP was not the predecessor to the TFT. No one at school knew this stuff. I was a nerd cool.

Since then, I went and fluked myself a degree in Computer Science and E-Business. After uni, I decided to do some freelancing, which eventually landed me into my current permanent role as Technical Team Leader at IPC Media. Specifically, I manage the techies in the Inspire division responsible for sites such as Web User, What Digital Camera, Trusted Reviews, etc. Not forgetting Stamp Magazine. Unfortunately, in this role, I'm not subjected to masses of tits and asses flooding into my inbox. Nuts and Loaded are, unfortunately, not part of my portfolio.

At IPC, in my team in particular, we are faced with a not-too-common problem. We are a portfolio team, meaning we deal with around 30 websites with a dev team of just seven. In an attempt to make our lives easier, it was decided that we'd invest our efforts into building our sites on the Symfony framework. Realising that most of our sites shared a similar structure, we then built a layer on top, namely Exemplar. Still in active use, Exemplar is a set of configurable plugins, built in-house, aimed at making it a breeze to add new functionality to the sites such as articles, reviews, events, etc. Although it helps, it is by no means ideal.

Performance. Maintainability. Extensibility. All of these are sub-optimal in our Symfony/Exemplar combo. But Symfony alone is not good enough for the job. Nor is any other framework that I've come across.

Enter the Pixelinx Framework.

This is a personal project of mine. Something that I've built to my own personal spec, but being mindful that, if done right, it would be a perfect platform for the folks at IPC. In my decision to make it open-source, I'm hoping that I'd earn myself some much needed support, encouragement and feedback from the ever growing PHP community. Maybe one day it'll be the weapon of choice for many like-minded developers, with similar problems to tackle.

License

The Pixelinx Framework is released under the MIT License.

Copyright © 2009 Adam Pancutt

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.