Here’s how I see it when it comes to development frameworks: unless you dig your heels in and make a decision you will keep finding new frameworks or debating backwards and forwards and never actually choose one. As an example, I said before that we have chosen Symfony as the framework of choice for the new M&G site. Since we made that decision we have explored building a small site with Cake and this week I have spent most of my time wondering whether maybe all we need is Code Igniter. Both of these frameworks are slightly lighter in terms of complexity than Symfony. What prompted the Code Igniter wanderlust was this article on Smashing Magazine. Last night, while trying to concentrate on counting sheep I kept thinking to myself, “maybe Symfony is too much, maybe all we need is a simple MVC solution”.

Let me stop myself and explain some of the rampant geekery in the previous paragraph first. Here are some questions a non-geek might ask:

Q: What is this framework business you keep going on about?
A: A framework is a set of applications that you use on a server that have prebuilt functionality, normally the most common requirements for building web sites, so things like MVC, ORM, caching, image manipulation, CRUD generation, and so on.

Q: Huh?
A: MVC = Model-View-Controller and is a best practice for separating your logic from your data from your look and feel. ORM = Object Relational Mapping and is a way to abstract your data so that you’re not dependent on the specifics of a particular database product and you stop using SQL. CRUD = Create, Read, Update, Delete – the most commong things you build into a contnet management system and also the most tedious because it is repetitive work.

Q: So basically you’re lazy…
A: Er…

Okay anyway, back to Symfony and why I remain resolute. Firstly I know Symfony is slower than Cake and Code Igniter, but this is solved by caching properly and the fact that we have enough hardware to make the site lightning fast based on slightly inflated user levels, and the fact that a few milliseconds on the server won’t be noticeable when we shave half the file size by using CSS layouts and gzip them on the way out. The plus is this, ironically: rapid development. Despite the megalith that Symfony is, this is also one of the positives – it allows us to generate a good-quality CMS by running a few commands on the server and then tweaking it using the config files. It also forces me, mr messy code himself, to play nicely with the other developers because it enforces a strict set of best-practices.

Tomorrow I go back to work after 3 weeks of relaxing with my family and the trusty XBox, and it is all going to start coming together. As i predicted, we’re behind the official schedule [now you know why I would prefer not to have one of those but anyway] so things are going to move fast. I have been gathering components and little bits and pieces of code and ideas we’re going to use, and I have been thinking about the Divine Proportion a lot. Achieving 1.618 is going to be a goal of mine but it is not going to be easy given the type of content I’ll be working with and the fact that there is going to be odd bit of advertising that needs a home on the page.

Speaking of layout, Google’s Blueprint CSS is installed and will be used to manage the CSS for the grid layout. This is another kind of framework, if you like, that allows us to use standards-based layout programming without having to reinvent the wheel. Basically it is a cascading stylesheet that divides your page into grid cells and you set up the grid based on how many columns your blocks span. It works and I like it.