Is MVC necessary for my site? Smarty?

[Square1]

Hi All:

Converting a 350 page ASP Classic site to PHP. Loads of SQL calls, IFs, Whiles, etc. I am the only developer working on it (at this point).

At this moment I do not know OOP so I would be coding procedurally. In my heart, this sounds like a mistake in the long term so I may need to learn OOP first.

1. Is doing PHP procedural coding such a "bad" thing. Maybe not today but what about in 5 years?

2. Is an MVC format necessary for my "specs"? Would something like Smarty clean things up "enough"?

3. If MVC is the smart choice, can their "weight" do more harm than good? Do they noticeably slow things down, especially on older, slower computers?

I really want to get this right the first time and not redo it (I should have written it in PHP 10 years ago!!!)

Thank you!

[dagon]

1. no procedural has and always will have a place.

2. MVC is only one modal, its no some great solution to all problems.

3. go to 2 :-)

4. not asked but, nothing i do is finished, im rewriting constantly, you can't write something that will last for ever, so much is changing constantly.
   4a, It's working now, is good enough for most businesses

never used used smarty but do use another template engine, so its up to you if that's the right one for the job.

[NogDog]

OOP can help you structure a large project into more manageable pieces -- possibly more important in a multi-developer environment, but I find it helps me keep things organized and more maintainable even in single developer projects. However, if you do not take the time to learn OOP and truly get a handle on why to use it and how to design an OOP application, you probably will not gain much from it -- you just end up writing procedural code wrapped up in classes.

An MVC framework can help take care of a lot of the boring "grunt work" of building a site and letting you concentrate on what is unique to yours. But to use any of them well (and to be able to learn them relatively quickly) will usually require at least some basic level of understanding of OOP concepts and their syntax in PHP. Another alternative would be to move up the next step of abstraction and use a CMS (Joomla, Drupal, etc. -- maybe even WordPress) if you find one that is a good match for the type of site you want to create. The right CMS may get you up and running even quicker, depending on precisely what you want to do and how well the CMS matches that. The downside is that you are depending on a lot of code you did not write, so it may be more difficult to maintain if something breaks, or if you suddenly need to add a feature not supported by that CMS out of the box.

You might want to poke around at http://php.opensourcecms.com/ for a look at dozens of possibilities in terms of CMS's and related tools. Also take a look at the CodeIgniter video tutorial to see if it makes any sense to you (one of the popular PHP frameworks).

Any framework or CMS will have a learning curve involved with it, so you need to factor that into your decision, too.