What is blaze?
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.
When you start with a microsite, you usually have either to choose your favorite (overkill) framework or cms or to start with nothing in your hands. So you setup the basic styles, maybe using a css reset, then you wireframe your pages, program them, style them and so on. In most cases, you will go with a quick’n’dirty solution as there is no time to really care about the dirty edges of the site (like error pages). It’s not professional, but hey – it works. blaze to the help!
Quick overview
These are some of the coding related features blaze ships with:
- lots of useful serverside bootstrapping (like correct mime types)
- automatic LESS, SCSS and Coffeescript compiling
- 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
- super easy database access, supporting MySQL & SQLite
- automatically branded error pages
- CSS reset and unreset
Yes, you’re right, that’s not something super special, it’s kind of the basics. But far too often, these basics do not exist and therefore have to be coded, or they will just not be implemented and prevent some cool ideas from being realized. And yes, you’re right again: it’s just the tip of the iceberg, there is much more underneath.
The real power of blaze lies in its combination with the elegant, fully brandable and responsive backend. Here are some of the things it will give you:
- full website administration, including branding
- fine tuned tangibility to make you and your customer get the “this is what I’ve payed for” feeling
- settings pane to improve and customize the behaviour of your site
- easy content protection and development mode, both are either totally blocking visitors or requesting a login
Again, that’s just an excerpt, there is much more included. Additionally, there are lots of plugins planned, partially already realized. This way you can easily add functionality to your website, like webstatistics, basic content editing, a microblog, a newsletter-sending plugin, and so on – all branded with your logo and colors.
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.
What is blaze not?
A huge framework to run web apps or large websites, a thing to use without understanding it, a pain in the … 
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.
Yes, we use the totally overused word ‘framework’ for blaze, but the name fits basically. Blaze provides an invisible framework of tools and configurations in order to run your small to medium website. There is a configuration backend, which can easily be branded to make your customers feel that they are using your product. There is a super easy plugin architecture which makes it a breeze to extend blaze’s functionality. And there are a lot of little helpers that will make your life as a developer easier.
Feature list
- Fully OO PHP framework
- Brandable backend
- Branded error pages
- Full administration including public access, maintenance mode, output compression/minification and much more
- Easy to use asset compiler with automatic caching, recompiling, minification and concatenation
- Simple database connector to provide quick access to MySQL and local SQLite databases
- Automatic serverside optimization
- Value/key caching component
- File content caching component
- 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
- Fully translatable backend, comes with English and German language files
- Branded login screens with the possibility to use them to protext single frontend pages
- One super mighty PHP object with lots of components to use in your frontend pages
- Much more
This feature list is incomplete because there is too much to tell. Read the documentation to learn about them all.
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.
blaze - php framework for small to medium websites (Miscellaneous)
No comments:
Post a Comment