ActiveScaffold for PHP

Question

Ruby on Rails has a bunch of plugins which extend the normal scaffolding:

• Lipsiadmin
• Hobo
• Streamlined
• ActiveScaffold

Does the PHP community have anything similar? phpmyadmin is great, but it doesn't have any way to control the presentation of the data. You always get all of the data in its presentation format. These Rails frameworks are a little more user friendly.

Edit: My original question was not very clear. I'm not looking to compare PHP and Rails. I'm also not looking for an all purpose general framework. I'm looking for something just like the four pieces of software I listed above, but written in PHP. The admin software I listed above generates a crud interface for you based on your configuration. The configuration includes which tables you'd like to show, what operations you can do to the table, and who can see the information. The software does the rest, from writing the SQL to processing the request to generating the interface.

Answer 1

have you looked at pear: http://pear.php.net/

Answer 2

It's important to stress the difference between a language and a framework here. PHP is not itself a framework with modules. PHP is a language, like C or Python.

There are several website frameworks that have been written in PHP. The most popular would probably be Drupal though there are several that I've looked at over the last year that seem similarly capable:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Joomla!
• Symfony
• Zend

PhpMyAdmin is not a module or a framework. It is a separate, stand-alone web application for database administration, written in PHP. It won't be a component in any strategy for presentation of data on a website.

Answer 3

I would look at Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgniter or Kohana. See if they have an addon or plugin that can do it.

The problem with the four pieces of software you listed is that they extend Rails. When you say "PHP," there is nothing to extend in the same sense. (I really doubt you want a PHP module that does this.) You don't need a PHP addon, you need a [framework] addon.

Any of the frameworks I or Jonathan listed are similar to Rails. Kohana in particular has an addon module called Auto Modeler that may do what you need.

Answer 4

Symfony may be a "general framework", but it has scaffolding you can use as a complete application if your needs are simple. You define your model in a YML config file, and can then generate CRUD modules based on this model. The code generation is also customizable by editing other YML config files. All without writing any PHP code. But should the need arise, you have the option to extend the scaffolding with PHP and the complete framework.

See the Symfony docs on code generation.

A framework called ATK also claims a good code:functionality ratio ("An application in 10 lines of code").