Some of my design decisions for this project are listed below.
This project is a very basic MVC from with integrated Authentication. It can be used as the base of any basic application. It is only for demo purposes and is not production-ready.
I am using the MVC organizational pattern to avoid duplication of code and facilitate a clean, logical structure with a separation of concerns. This also adds flexibility and extensibility to the system.
I am loosely basing this off the concepts used for Laravel.
The structure of the code and features are more than a project like this would likely need. This is to make the system more extensible, focusing more on sustainability and scalability.
Utilizes namespaces as outlined in the PSR-4 standard. PSR-4 autoloading enables us to easily use namespaces to separate internal package files from those of dependencies that may be installed in the future as well as future internal functionality that may share class names.
I set up routing based on url parameters to make it easy to add new routes. Each route can be configured to allow for a callback so that they can be processed differently. The routing is also designed to accept wildcards.
Views utilize templates to avoid duplicating code. There is also a Response controller to handle HTTP responses.
The form data is sanitized in the Request class in case invalid characters are submitted in the form.
I made the fields of each model as properties. That way we can set all the properties at once (using loadData). This makes setting the data really convenient.
All the models extend from a base model which can set the properties and validate them.
I incorporated basic session handling for flash messages and authentication.
There is basic server-side form validation. The error messages are added when the form is created. This is easily done as each form field is dynamically created.
Only authenticated users can access certain pages, such as the Profile page.
I am using a simple middleware pattern so more middlewares can be added as needed instead of being stuck with one strategy of a million if-elses.