Table of contents for Garden

1. Exploring the Garden PHP framework
2. Creating a basic application in Garden

I first tried to DIY it by duplicating the “Skeleton” application and editing things. That didn’t last long as there are a fair number of files and I don’t know the system well enough to just zip around the relevant ones and go.

Then I had an idea. “I could check the documentation!”

So I did, and found “A Quick-Start Guide to Writing Applications in Garden“. Perfect!

Well, kind of. It was quick, but provoked a bit of head-scratching as it’s apparently in need of a little updating. For instance, following along as best I could resulted in an ugly, unstyled page when the Guide indicated I should have a lovely, finished-looking beauty. Turns out I needed to add a bunch of javascript and style calls.

Much more concerning than these minor oversights is the final sentence:

Of course you can do much more than just simple pages, but this is really all you need to know in order get your own applications up and running.

Ummm… The Guide ends with a basic, essentially static page with “Hello world!” printed on it. No mention of how to interact with the database, for instance. Which wouldn’t be too bad, except all of the links to “full documentation on applications” lead to an error: “The page you’re looking for doesn’t exist (yet)”

Well, those are the brakes sometimes, right? So now I’ll plow in and see what I can figure out from the code itself (it’s supposed to be well-commented), and record what I’m doing to get the results (I’m hoping that) I get. Wish me luck!

Table of contents for Garden

1. Exploring the Garden PHP framework
2. Creating a basic application in Garden

I have been passively following the development of Garden for a while now. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a PHP framework that makes it easy to get started and includes all of the user management stuff that most web applications need.

This seems like a great fit for me because I despise spending ages (which is what it always seems to take) to get the user stuff working on other PHP frameworks. Makes me crazy and I dislike it enough that it’s actually kept me from starting some projects. (I’ll admit this probably says more about me than the frameworks.)

So that’s the good news about Garden. Unfortunately, there’s also bad news (for me), and that’s the fact that Garden is still very much in development and the documentation is utter crap. Well, I should be more specific: what’s there is well-written. There are just huge gaping holes in what’s there.

I also am not clear on how to contribute to the documentation (which I would gladly do), so for the moment, I’ve settled on this blog for gathering what I’ve learned.

It’s worth noting that because Garden is evolving so rapidly, it’s likely that the problems I’m running into will be fixed, rendering this category of posts outdated. So be it. Until that point, hopefully it will save someone else a little trouble.