Hi there, and welcome to Numbat! Numbat is a really, really small CMS where items are identified by one thing only... their URL. It is also completely media independent, as you can use the view system to create almost any type.

Numbat also features a built-in administration, but it is extremely lite by design.

Numbat is licensed under the BSD license (also in license.txt).

The first step to using Numbat is to create a configuration file. For a start, copy app/config.sample.php to app/config.php and edit the database details and the base URL.

Numbat is based around items. Items are simply a way of grouping data, and each item has only one identifying piece of information: the URL.

Data is stored for each item. Each piece of data has a pointer to its parent item, a name, a value and a type. Datatypes control how data is displayed in the administration panel, and how the data is stored in the database. Data is expected to be stored in plain text in the database, as datatypes themselves have no control of the output on the frontend.

Numbat comes with two default datatypes, the Text datatype, and the HTML datatype. Text is used for any one-liner text, such as the document's title, while HTML can be used for anything, usually body content. Numbat also has one internal datatype, View. This datatype must exist for every item, and can only be used once for the "view" row. The value of this row determines which view is loaded by the Controller.

Views control the output of an item, and are supplied with all the data relating to the current item. Views can be anything, and do not have to output HTML.

The "default" view acts as a base for other views, and supplies several handy functions, listed below. All of these methods can be changed to your heart's content.

The config method returns the configuration instance. This can be used to output your baseurl for portability, but could also be used along with custom entries in the configuration to switch between "production" and "development" output.

The get method returns the value from the row whose name is specified by the first parameter to the method. For example, to get the "title" row's value, one could use $this->get('title') in the view.

The output method simply outputs the result of get and is purely a convienience method.

The getType method returns the datatype of the row whose name is specified by the first parameter. It is up to the view to decide what to do with this.

If the secondary parameter of get is set to true, the view will parse the value of the row for a "shortcode". Shortcodes are small instructions for the view, and are replaced with their corresponding values. They are written in the form {x.y}, where x specifies the type of data. This is either config or req. {config.y} would be replaced by the configuration setting for "y". {req.y} would be replaced by the request variable "y". The request variables available are:

• "page" - The current requested page ID (e.g. some/page)
• "url" - The requested URL (e.g. http://example.com/some/page)
• "time" - The time the page started loading in seconds (as a float)
• "error" - Whether the current page is an error.

Any shortcodes which do not have a prefix will be taken as a row name, and will be replaced by the corresponding value. {y} would be replaced by the value stored for the "y" row.

The names of classes within Numbat use a special naming scheme which you must adhere to when writing your application.

Views must live in the views/ subdirectory. The filename is based on the class name. For the View "Foo", the filename would be "foo.php", and the class would be named "View_Foo". All view class names must be prefixed with "View_".

Datatypes must live in the datatypes/ subdirectory. The filename is based on the class name. For the Datatype "Foo", the filename would be "foo.php", and the class would be named "Data_Foo". All view class names must be prefixed with "Data_".

The internal structure of Numbat is written to enable you to override any class. Simply copy the file you wish to overload into the corresponding directory in your app directory.

For example, to override the Views class, you would copy numbat/classes/views.php to app/classes/views.php

Numbat is designed to be able to work without the need for mod_rewrite. If your server does not have mod_rewrite enabled, you can simply add /index.php to your baseurl in the configuration.

Note: Your server needs to have pathinfo enabled for this to work. If neither mod_rewrite nor pathinfo are enabled, you will not be able to use Numbat.

Numbat is designed to be used for more than one application. The easiest way to do this is to copy the app directory and the .htaccess and index.php files to a new directory. You will need to change the NUMBAT_PATH in index.php to the local directory Numbat resides in.