Another PHP framework

Starting in late 2003, I began to formulate a web site framework in PHP for MCR, Inc in Mayfield Village, Ohio. MCR is (Marketing Communication Resource) a company who gets your information where you want it, ie. they have Xerox production laser printers, envelope sutffers, folders, they work with mail houses and send emails.

Part of their business is collecting, editing, and composing client data. This is where the web comes in. MCR also runs hundreds of concurent but separate customer jobs whose starting and ending dates are not related. The web had been used, in a copy and edit way, to create custom web sites for jobs that needed public facing web pages as well as internal data control facilities.

Because of the copy and edit process, features were strewn across the landscape with little hope of coming back together in a concerted way to enhance the "copy base". So the original goal of the framework was to clean up the "copy base" ideas in to a real framework that was reused rather than customized. The challenge was to take the concepts from the old PHP, the needs of the business and to create a new thing which would provide what was needed in a single place, where customization was performed because the shape of the job was different, not because a new feature was needed. That is to say customization equals configuration.