Slim: PHP5 Micro Framework

It's pretty lightweight and you're not going to find tons of functionality built into it. But don't let it fool you. It is pretty easy to extend or build upon and has some important pieces of functionality that a framework should have already built in.

My only "beef" with Slim is probably that it doesn't give a great Controller structure if you're going to take an MVC approach to things. But I'm still just starting to play with the framework so I might find a way to build in something more like what I'm expecting. I typically like the CodeIgniter approach on controllers/routes. I'd like to see if I can figure out a way to minimally recreate that functionality so I can make a new route just by dropping a file/class/method into the appropriate place(s). For a small site this would be a non-issue anyhow.

Twig: Template Engine

This is rather easily integrated into Slim and gives you a nice template engine for your views. I'm typically not a fan of mustache templating systems but Twig is a pretty robust engine. In my playing around with it, I am finding myself willing to deal with the mustaches in order to gain the advantages Twig is providing.

phpDataMapper

phpDataMapper is more or less a port of the Ruby DataMapper project. This is the one I've had the least time spent with of the 3 items on this list. But I definitely enjoy not having to worry about escaping things for the database, etc., and being able to quickly establish a database back end for the app I'm using this setup with. I went from no database connection to pulling data out and displaying it on my page in about 5 minutes with phpDataMapper.

Could I have done all of this with something like CodeIgniter? Sure. I'm a big fan of CodeIgniter so I'm not making this list as an argument against CI or other PHP frameworks. I will say that I was able to integrate Slim, Twig, and phpDataMapper in about 15 minutes of Googling and typing.

One advantage I could see to using a setup like this is that you get to very explicitly choose where you want to put weight into the framework you're piecing together for your application. I'm not sure how light-weight Twig and phpDataMapper would be considered, but Slim is definitely light-weight. Database interactions and rendering are areas that I was ok with adding weight to the application for because of what they provide me.

If you’re building a technology-driven company, you better have a culture that loves engineers, and I mean love. All too often, I see entrepreneurs who say they "just need engineers" to "bang out the code" for this great idea of theirs. If you view engineers as interchangeable factory workers instead of partners and creative people, you’re in for a tough time getting huge in a world driven by technology.

You will probably find it to be a bit of a "slow down in order to speed up" routine. I had previously played with it a little so I was able to dive in pretty fast this time around and found it pretty straight forward after having wrapped my head around it the first time several weeks back.

I originally found out about it by reading the article "Facilitating Development Environment Consistency" over on the PHP advent site. So that might be a good place for you to start if you're interested in the approach.

If you're not already subscribed to PHP Advent or following them on Twitter, I'd highly recommend it. New articles only come in December of each year but some of them can be pretty stellar.

It was a tough decision to leave Snagajob. I got to do a lot of fun things there and helping folks find jobs definitely felt nice. I was doing a lot of WordPress work there along with a healthy serving of straight up front end web development.

Those are good lead-in's to what I'm excited about with MacRumors. I'll still be doing some WordPress work I'm sure, and I'm fairly certain I'll be doing plenty of front end web development as well. But it also sounds like there will be a good bit of opportunity for me to get back to my roots as a PHP developer. Rather than working primarily in a niche of PHP (e.g. WordPress), I'll get the opportunity to branch back out into more general PHP applications as well as wear many other hats I'm sure.

So here's to new beginnings and the opportunities they bring.