Pointy is an open source MVC development framework for PHP that is lightweight but intuitive.

Pointy is perfect for LAMP-based websites of any size that contain dynamic content.

It was created by Damian Peterson of nice.co.nz and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Please feel free to use it and if you find a way to make it even better, email me with suggestions.

How it works

Pointy interprets the URL that is requested and tries to match it to a function within a Controller class.

For example, if it receives the request http://www.example.com/about/staff/ it will look for the Staff function within the AboutController class. From there, the Controller can call a Model to connect to the database to get a list of staff members and pass that data onto a View (which is like a template) to render the page.

You can also extend Pointy's capabilities by adding plugins much as you would with classes in an ordinary PHP project.

Download

Most recent version:
Pointy 10.0503

Archive:
Pointy 9.0304
Pointy 9.0217
Pointy 9.0213
Pointy 8.0911

SVN repository

http://code.google.com/p/pointy/

Installing

Copy the .htaccess file along with the application directory to the root of your site.

Now pointy will try to find controllers and views automatically depending on the URL it receives.

You should only ever need to edit the Settings.php file. Leave the others alone unless you want to hack Pointy's core functionality.

I like to make the following four additional directories within the application directory: controllers, models, views and plugins. You can set where Pointy will look for files and classes in the Settings.php file.

Demo

Take a look at spending.peterson.net.nz (an example site I made that can keep track of an allowance and expenses).

To see how this site works you can download the working files and have a play around. You will have to set up a database and alter the connection settings in the Settings.php file. An SQL dump of the database is included.