TiP 0.3.3

TiP 0.3.3 offers you a free, open source and general purpose framework which is designed for quickly building a working web site in a typical PHP/MySQL environment. TiPIt is targeted at developers, experienced Web administrators and anyone unafraid of hacking and using a text editor.

If you want a weblog, an eCommerce site or a wiki platform there are powerful and better open source alternatives to TiP. But if you are a web designer, used to get hands dirty with HTML and CSS stuff, or you find yourself spending too much time in hacking instead of programming, TiP can be an option... and you can build a weblog, an eCommerce site or a wiki platform using TiP too.

Major Features:

1. Logic and style completely separated:
   • Although not easily to do in PHP, in TiP seems to work well. Under the style directory you will never meet a PHP command and under the logic directory you will never meet any HTML tag.
2. High flexibility:
   • As a direct consequence of the logic/style separation, the user interface can be whatever you want. To be more specific, TiP is a preprocessor, not a CMS: this means the stuff you found in the style/ directory is a sample implementation of TiP, not TiP itself.
3. Modular structure:
   • The need to easily add or remove features is one of the target of this project. The TIP_Module is the brick over which the extension mechanism is built.
4. Quick responsiveness:
   • TiP is quick, at least with the default TIP_RcbtNG engine. Furthermore, the template compilation and the static cache can make the difference.
   • Whenever in doubt between different ways I ever selected the fastest (against simplicity).
5. Template and data engine abstraction:
   • The TIP_Template_Engine and TIP_Data_Engine abstract classes bring a common methods to access the underlying engines. This helps extending TiP beyond its natural limits, adding support for PostgreSql for instance or using another template engine instead of RcbtNG.

Enhancements:

• The new TIP_XML data engine has been implemented using SimpleXML: it has a basic SQL parser that provides WHERE and LIMIT clauses and a fairly extensible design based on XPaths.
• TIP_Youtube2 is a new content module (which internally use TIP_XML) that provides read-only access to YouTube feeds v.2.
• Another XML based module, TIP_Devhelp2, has been added. It has facilities to access .devhelp2 files, generated by gtk-doc, allowing to keep a site up to date with the source docs with a minimum effort.
• The URI rendering of TIP_Hierarchy modules has been improved.

Requirements:

• PHP 5.2.0 or later
• MySql 4.0.12 or later: MySql 4.1 or later is strongly suggested. The dependencies with the database server strictly depend from which data engine you use. MySql is the default data engine. Also remember that, at least teorically, with a specific data engine you can work without a database server. Furthermore, you can have different data engines with different modules.