Introduction to the Geeklog 2 FrameworkG2

It will be worth your while to download and install the Sample Contact Manager Applicationas it is a working example that illustrates the use of the Geeklog 2 framework. Installation should be fairly trivial as I have included all necessary PEAR libraries in the tarball (hence the unusually large footprint for such a small appliction). To install, create a database called PHPARCH and import the sql/create.sql. Be sure you have MySQL 4.1.x and that it supports the use of INNODB (it will work without it but transactions are supported by the framework). From there, edit the config.php. The comments in that file should explain everything just fine. Please email me at tony AT geeklog DOT net if you have any trouble getting the application installed.

From this point, I'm assuming that you have the sample application installed. From the login screen use tbibbs as the username (the password doesn't matter) and submit the page. That should take you to a listing of two contacts. If you have gotten that far with no errors then you are ready to proceed.

Here are the things you will learn about in this introduction:

1. MVCnPHP
   1. Introduction to the Model-View-Controller design pattern
   2. A Note About Template Engines
   3. A Simple View
   4. Commands
   5. Introduction to Models
   6. The MVCnPHP Controller
2. Propel
   1. Introduction to Object Relational Mapping (ORM) Tools
   2. Building the Propel Schema
   3. Building the Model Objects
3. The Propel Data Access Object
   1. Retrieving Propel Objects
   2. Saving (Persisting) Propel Objects
   3. Deleting Propel Objects
   4. Customized Queries using Named Queries Concept