Introduction: MVC concepts and development environment setup

1. The problem with writing web applications: how NOT to structure your code
2. The MVC pattern: What it is and how it can help you write better code
3. Install a web server, database server and PHP on your computer
4. Start writing the framework: Create the folders and configure the web server
5. Addendum: Additional configuration for AMPPS on Windows
6. MVC concepts

Routing: how URLs are processed in an MVC framework

1. Configure the web server to have pretty URLs
2. Addendum: Possible additional configuration required for the Apache web server
3. Create and require (not include) the router class
4. Create the routing table in the router, and add some routes
5. Match the requested route to the list of routes in the routing table
6. Routing and front controller concepts

Advanced routing: add simpler but more powerful routes

1. How to do complex string comparisons: an introduction to regular expressions
2. Using special characters in regular expressions: advanced pattern matching
3. Write even more powerful regular expressions: use character sets and ranges
4. Extract parts of strings using regular expression capture groups
5. Get the controller and action from a URL with a fixed structure
6. Replace parts of strings using regular expressions
7. Get the controller and action from a URL with a variable structure
8. Add custom variables of any format to the URL
9. Regular expressions
10. Advanced routing

Controllers and actions

1. How to create objects and run methods dynamically
2. Dispatch the route: create the controller object and run the action method
3. How to better organise your classes by using namespaces
4. Class autoloading: load classes automatically without having to require them
5. Load classes automatically: add namespaces and an autoload function
6. Remove query string variables from the URL before matching to a route
7. Pass route parameters from the route to all controllers
8. The __call magic method: how to call inaccessible methods in a class
9. Action filters: call a method before and after every action in a controller
10. Addendum: fix for a potential security bug introduced with the action filters
11. Organise controllers in subdirectories: add a route namespace option
12. Controllers and actions

Views

• Display a view: create a class to render views and use it in a controller
• Output escaping: what it is, why do it, and how and when to do it
• Pass data from the controller to the view
• Templating engines: what they are and how they can improve your PHP code
• Make views easier to create and maintain: add a template engine
• Addendum: Changes in Twig 2.0
• Addendum: How to easily fix a potential exception when rendering a Twig template
• Remove repetition in the view templates: add a base template to inherit from
• Views

Models

1. Models: an introduction
2. Create a database and check you can connect to it from PHP
3. An introduction to PDO: why it makes working with databases in PHP easier
4. Add a model, get data from the database and display it in a view
5. Optimise the database connection: connect only on demand and reuse it
6. Erratum: Correction to the Optimise the database connection code

Configuration and error handling

1. Put application configuration settings in a separate file
2. How PHP reports problems: errors, exceptions, and how to handle them
3. Handle errors: convert errors to exceptions and add an exception handler
4. PHP configuration settings: where to find them and how to change them
5. Configure PHP to display error messages
6. Show detailed error messages to developers, friendly error messages to users
7. Categorise different types of error using HTTP status codes
8. Add views to make error pages look nicer in production
9. Configuration and error handling