LFY

Further to the new blogging format I came up with recently, it's developed into an idea that warrants its own repository and logo.

LFY (pronouned: leafy; backronym: Less Fiddly) is written in PHP 5.3 and is essentially a simple methodology for managing code libraries shared between web projects. LFY splits its core code base, code libraries, project data and libraries and site data into entirely separate blocks and re-unites them using a very simple command syntax (and a clear real-world analogy).

LFY was borne out of the idea of giving text files the same meta possibilities as many media formats - making them entirely extractable and re-pluggable, allowing the use of databases to cache and query metadata but essentially closing the door on the typical CMS-driven site since it renders any graphical interface redundant.

LFY therefore encourages you to think of each page of a site as a leaf; and then of .htaccess files (that contain LFY's environment variables) as the stem that contain all the information about the plant it's attached to.

You might get a better idea at what I'm driving at by reading the source of the index page, where you'll notice that I simply wrote the content of the page in a text editor and plonked it on the server Not any more you can't. Drupal 7 is not bad, and much easier than trying to blog on a platform in alpha. LFY is a brief and lightweight yet potentially fairly complex codebase, in order to keep things as simple as possible when actually using it. To help keep things simple under the hood, some analogies are prevalent in the namespace:

• Plants are sites and sections of sites.
• Pots are essentially project wrappers. A pot may contain many plants.
• Species are types of plant, e.g. blog, gallery, etc. (and flavours thereof).

I repo'd LFY to Google Code (http://code.google.com/p/lfy) using Mercurial. You can check it out by doing:

hg clone https://lfy.googlecode.com/hg/ lfy