RealTown's Framework

We have been making some significant changes to RealTown and one of them includes a rewrite of the base code. Initially, RealTown was created entirely from scratch, but once the site began to grow, so did our code base. The biggest obstacle for our developers was the learning curve -- not only did they have to know PHP, but they had to learn RealTown's custom PHP code.

After many discussions and meetings, we came to the conclusion that RealTown needs to be in a framework. A framework is a common set of programming code that developers can learn once and use to build many sites. Most frameworks also have a very large developer community, meaning our own development questions can be answered from people outside our 4 walls.

Once we were certain that a framework was necessary, we had to answer the next big question: which framework to choose?

If you're a PHP developer, you probably have heard of or even used several of the popular frameworks out there. You may have even written your own. We needed something that was not only powerful but had a strong user community. Our two main choices were CakePHP and Zend Framework.

To help familiarize ourselves with the two frameworks, we dove right in to rebuilding some of our applications in them. CakePHP had the best learning curve, where we could have a basic CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) application up in less than an hour. We began rebuilding our Communities application in CakePHP, and we are currently in the process of migrating each of the Communities over to the new platform.

To check out the new Communities, click here.

Part-way through the development of the new Communities, we decided to explore the Zend Framework. Setting up a website took a little more time than it did with CakePHP, but once everything was configured it started to become easier.

It was around this time that we decided we need to let our own RealTown members create their own communities. We decided to tackle this project as a completely new application written in the Zend Framework. The learning curve of Zend Framework paid off as it is extremely powerful and flexible once you get the hang of it.

The "Member Communities" that you are seeing here is powered by the Zend Framework. Also, the "login" page is also now powered by the Zend Framework to take advantage of its powerful Zend_Auth component.

Working with two frameworks can be just as confusing as developing under a custom one, so we are slowly rewriting the entire website in the Zend Framework.

The first of RealTown's current applications to be re-written in Zend is the RealTown Articles. The new Articles application will have new features and better usability, especially in the area of comments. We will then rewrite the rest of RealTown, starting with the homepage. The Blogs application is going to be re-written as well, so you longer will need to be redirected to the old "realtownblogs.com" web server for managing your blogs.