The Almost No Effort Web Toolkit is a collection of PHP libraries designed to aid rapid web development.
Anewt is not a web framework, although nothing prevents you to build one using it. Anewt provides you with all the tools without forcing you to organize your project in a specific way. That means you can use your own preferred directory layout, filenames, etc. This makes Anewt both suited for new projects and for integration in existing projects.
The modules in Anewt help you quickly create fully standards-compliant dynamic web sites and web applications. It consists of a number of modules which help you work with strict XHTML pages, text formatting, database abstraction and validation, form creation and handling and other web-related things like session control and syndication. Anewt is entirely written in PHP (developed for PHP4, works fine on PHP5).
The overview chapter gives a general introduction to Anewt. The basic concepts and the structure of the Anewt package will be explained. This chapter is recommended for all readers.
The following chapters gives you some advice on how to use Anewt. You are in no way required to follow these guidelines and conventions, but the project structure outlined in these chapters may be of great help to new users.
The remaining chapters (quite a few) each deal with an Anewt
module. The core module is used
by almost all other modules, so you are highly recommended to read
the chapter about it.
You don't need to read all those chapters to start using Anewt, but since some modules depend on other modules, you will need at least some basic knowledge of the module that is built upon.
Let us know what you think! We are interested in all comments, complaints and, of course, compliments from our users. User feedback helps us improve Anewt.
Bugs, issues and feature requests can be reported in our bug tracking system. Describe your problem clearly and include a small test case if possible.
You can also join our IRC channel
#anewt on OFTC (irc.oftc.net) to have a chat with
developers and other users. Just ask your question and wait
patiently. We're not always available for chatting right away.
Become a contributor! If you're implementing a cool new feature or fixing an issue, please file a bug for it, so that we we can track development and no work is duplicated. Patches to Anewt can be submitted as attachments to bug reports. If you choose to publish your changes as a public accessible branch, please comment on the bug telling where to find your branch.
Before publishing your code, make sure you've read the file
HACKING in the top level Anewt
directory. It contains information about our code guidelines and
conventions. The Anewt source code is intended to be easily
understandable, so all functions and methods must be documented
(using Doxygen syntax), code must be well formatted and code
comments should be written for all non-obvious code
constructs.