Controllers and views (and viewClasses)

The process of building the output page is made of several steps, some of them are optional. Here is a summary:

After the framework has prepared the environment (database connections, routing…) and made the necessary checks (user authentication), your controller comes alive. The parts in blue are your code:

1. Your controller is called/instantiated to implement the content logic. For that it can use the framework help: your queries and the Core to access the data, the theme’s mods to prepare snippets of output.

2. Optionally, you can use a view (e.g. Smarty) to build the “main” part of the result page from the data and snippets you gathered.

3. An optional viewClass can add view-specific logic, such as enabling specific library or adding a css.

Then the frameworks take care of the rest:

4. The theme builds the result pages with your output, adding all the necessary additions: menus, METAs, jquery and jqueryui, the theme’s css, etc.

As you can see, the code doesn’t have to be executed in the same order as the results will be shown in the page.