We have been developing our open source micro framework for 4 years now.  We haven’t publicized it much but we’ve poured hundreds of hours into it and use it considerably on client projects. The framework and many of its modules are used and liked in the PHP community.

We are ready to take Erdiko to the next level and in the process of architecting a new Erdiko framework.  The next version will be more modular, better tested and, most importantly, built on top of an existing micro framework.

When we started Erdiko the other micro frameworks weren’t there yet, thats part of the reason we start Erdiko.  Silex and slim were in infancy, lumen didn’t exist (and Laravel was just starting to get more notice), and heck composer was less than a year old and wasn’t on many people radar yet.  Fast forward a few years and we now find a very different landscape for PHP and JavaScript development.

Speaking of this landscape, the fact that we can and do move much of the app to the front-end with powerful JavaScript frameworks means the duty of the back end has changed.  You no longer need to add ridiculous layers of front-end logic in your PHP classes and templates.  This shift alone means you need to rethink what you need from a php framework.

Thats where micro frameworks soar…places where you need a fast backend and leveraging a smarter front-end (e.g. SPA with JavaScript).  Add the great SaaS tools at your disposal as well and you have all the ingredients to make performant websites that you can grow your business with.  You don’t need a big bloated full stack in most cases.  If you do, often the built in feature X just won’t cut it and you end up integrating a 3rd party package or writing that component yourself anyways.

Now back to the topic at hand, what’s the deal with SlimPHP?  After reviewing numerous frameworks it became apparent that SlimPHP was the best of bunch for the kind of code we like, community we like and of course the kind of features and performance we like.  It’s router, http objects and flexibility has Erdiko beat.  We also looked at and experimented with Silex, lumen and some others before making the decision.

Erdiko adds the MVC and theming support to a typical micro framework.  We’ve developed some useful components and feel that adding these on top of an existing framework will make development even more efficient and flexible.

Erdiko has some special features that will aim to make development more enjoyable and lead to better applications.  We have been distilling pieces of Erdiko that will be moved and improved to work with Slim.  Right now we feel the configuration, theme engine and controller support will make the cut.  Actually quite a bit of erdiko will exist in the new framework, but we will strive to leverage slimphp and the slim paradigm whenever possible.  On the model side we have included wrappers for powerful ORMs so that developers can pick the best one for the job and install with one command.