This step by step guide will help you get set up with EpiCode (documentation) in under 15 minutes. EpiCode is a framework that maps URLs to static methods. It also has a few utility functions to make templating completely painless. There’s no new templating syntax to learn since PHP does a great job at that already. EpiCode also handles variable scope so you don’t have to worry about mucking up the global namespace.

Step 1
Download the source from http://www.jaisenmathai.com/files/epicode-1.0.tar.gz. The package should contain a php and htdocs directory. Extract these files to your web server such that the htdocs directory is your document root. EpiCode separates your models and views from the controller by placing them outside the web root. This helps ensure your site doesn’t leak files unintentionally.

You’ll need to make sure that your web server has mod_rewrite turned on and allows .htaccess files. Inside the htdocs directory you’ll find an index.php and a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file is pretty simple and has the following rules.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\?*$ index.php?__route__=$1 [L,QSA]

This will take any request to a file which does not exist and re-route it to index.php. The file path and query string are passed in to index.php. This way you can use GET and POST variables like normal.

Step 2
One of the most important steps is to define your routes. These are URLs which you want your users to be able to visit. These can be anything that’s a valid path (i.e. yoursite.com/mypage, yoursite.com/somefile.html). It’s important to know that these directories or files do not need to exist. EpiCode will take that path and map it to a method you specify. You can specify the mappings as an array $_['routes'] = array([...]). The included sample defines the routes in the index.php file.

$_['routes'] = array(
                ”                => array(’MyClass’, ‘MyMethod’),
                ’sample’          => array(’MyClass’, ‘MyOtherMethod’),
                ‘anypath/source’  => array(’MyClass’, ‘ViewSource’),
              );

This will create 3 pages or URLs. If a user goes to yoursite.com then EpiCode would call MyClass::MyMethod(). The URL yoursite.com/sample would execute MyClass::MyOtherMethod(). Inside of your methods you can do whatever you’d like. Going into details is outside the scope of the EpiCode framework itself. Generally from inside the method I include other class files and do all of the business logic. I mainly use EpiCode::display() and EpiCode::redirect().

Step 3
Now you can actually fill in the methods to add some content and functionality to your site. The details of this step are pretty boring but the methods in the example give you a good place to start.

  class MyClass
  {
    static public function MyMethod()
    {
      echo '
You are looking at the output from MyClass::MyMethod

Call MyClass::MyMethod
Call MyClass::MyOtherMethod
View the source of this page


‘;
    }

    static public function MyOtherMethod()
    {
      echo ‘
You are looking at the output from MyClass::MyOtherMethod

Call MyClass::MyMethod
Call MyClass::MyOtherMethod
View the source of this page


‘;
    }

    static public function ViewSource()
    {
      echo ‘
You are looking at the output from MyClass::ViewSource

Call MyClass::MyMethod
Call MyClass::MyOtherMethod
View the source of this page


‘;
      highlight_file(__FILE__);
    }
  }

Conclusion
EpiCode is perfect for developers who want a framework which doesn’t completely define their workflow. You have a great deal of flexibility and EpiCode doesn’t define ways in which you should do common tasks. This is by design as there are more than several ways to tackle each problem. Leave a comment if you have any questions and make sure you check out the documentation.

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