Building on

From PHPDevShell

(written on August 7, 2009 for version 2.7.0)

Before reading all the details about writing code for PHPDevShell, you might wonder how you could build a website on it. Despite what you may feel at first glance, most kind of website can easily fit on PHPDevShell; in fact, many website around the world do, and most users don't realize that.

After a fresh install, a PHPDevShell site looks like a "modular console": a clean interface composed of icons to manage various administration tasks (user administration, access control, and many more). All these functionalities are bundled into plugins, and you might think adding your own will only add icons to the administrative interface. But you can do much more than, based on two really simple concepts:

• any page can be "the home page"
• every page can have its own look

So, let's say you write a plugin which have a script just saying "hello world"; all you need to do is to specify for this page a look that DOESN'T show the menus, and set it as your site home page. When a user comes to your site, (s)he will only see "hello world". Of course, a real web page is much more complex, but now you can use PHPDevShell advanced features on database access, security settings, templating, localization... to make your work easier.

And don't forget you need to keep a way to access the administrative interface, but it's up to you to decide how you want to do it.