There once was a time, when website creation was about art and fine tuning code edges with love for the details. Especially smaller websites were coded with the user in mind, realizing small and neat features that would make the page visitors remember your site. Nowadays, it’s all about which framework to use, how to force the content in the framework and how to get the project done. Let’s step back and put the love back in!
We wanted to be able to code a small website like we once did. But there is much to care about. Like “How to minify and compile assets quickly?”, “How to optimize page output and caching stuff?” and so on. We often used cool frameworks like laravel or symfony or even wordpress – which took much of our time and was total overkill.
That’s why we created blaze. We wanted to have a framework that would take away our worries without forcing us to stick to MVC patterns (which are great for web apps but overkill for smaller website projects). blaze allows us to code like we were just doing html with some php injections and forget about the worries that a website brings with it.
blaze allows us to start coding right away. Just plain HTML with some PHP additions, it’s back to coding the beautiful website we wanted to create.
In lack of a better description we call blaze a drop-in php framework. It is supposed to run microsites, landingpages, product sites and other small to medium web projects. It’s super easy to integrate, gives you a lot of cool features and automatic improvements and won’t force you to work any way you don’t want to.
Quick overview
These are some of the coding related features blaze ships with:
- fully OO PHP framework
- easy to use asset compiler with automatic caching, recompiling, minification and concatenation, supporting LESS, SCSS and Coffeescript compiling
- brandable backend
- full administration including public access, maintenance mode, output compression/minification and much more
- settings pane to improve and customize the behaviour of your site
- easy authentication system, branded login screens with one line of code
- properly coded and branded error pages
- cache and settings handling with one line per action
- simple database connector to provide quick access to MySQL and local SQLite databases
- lots of useful serverside bootstrapping (like correct mime types)
- CSS reset and unreset
- automatic serverside optimization
- lot’s of information about your visitor (like language, used browser and OS, IP, and so on)
- automatic updates (via plugin, needs curl)
- fully branded visitor counter including some information on browsers, search engines, and so on
- one super mighty PHP object with lots of components to use in your frontend pages
- fine tuned tangibility to make you and your customer get the “this is what I’ve payed for” feeling
- much more
There is much more hidden underneath, but this would go too far for a small overview. Read the documentation to see how everything works in detail.
How to use blaze?
You get a folder which you will have to drop into your webspace. Run a very quick installer and you’re done. You don’t have to follow any rules, just create your website like you normally would have. Use pure HTML and PHP, assets of all types and so on. No need for a templating language or any sort of integration. blaze is just there to help you.
In your code, you will be able to use blaze’s components without having to care for anything else. You can protect your site from public access with a click, you also can enable asset minification with a click, and you can do much more. All without having to learn a big framework and with full flexibility.
Extending the framework
blaze comes with an easy to use plugin architecture which allows you to extend it’s possibilities without having to hack the core itself. Read about it in the documentation.
Who is blaze made for?
blaze is made for php developers with all levels of experience. It was made with web agencies in mind, that want to provide a branded solution to their clients, and maybe integrate their own services.
What can blaze do for me?
blaze will save you both money and time. And it will help to go from quick’n’dirty to quick’n’clean.
System requirements
blaze was tested and made to run on mostpart of standard hosting solutions. It was tested with PHP 5.3.3 to 5.6 and should run on nearly all PHP configurations you may encounter on shared hosting environments.
We recommend running blaze on Apache, which powers most shared hosting servers. We also can confirm that blaze might work on nginx as long as there is support for .htaccess and mod_rewrite.
These are the recommended system requirements:
- Apache v2.2 or higher
- PHP 5.4 or higher
- mod_rewrite
- Curl extension
- Zip extension
These are the minimum system requirements we do support:
- Apache v2.2 or higher
- PHP 5.3.3 or higher
- mod_rewrite
Some of the features will require other Apache modules to be installed (like mod_expires for proper expire headers on images) or certain PHP extensions (like zip for branding import/export). In modern times, these should be installed and activated on most servers.
Automatic updates won’t work if PHP’s curl extension is not installed.
In case you encounter a problem related to an incompatibility with your server setup, let us know and we’ll see what we can do.
Check your server before buying blaze!
As we don’t want you to buy blaze and not be able to use it, we provide a system checking script. You will find this script here: blaze.moay.de/#goblaze.