Documentation / Features
Lightweight
The Orion PHP5 Framework is built for small to medium scale applications and websites. Its low memory footprint and light weight make it a must-have tool for fast web development.
The framework loads only the code it needs as you write it. This means that if you are writing a RESTful application that doesn’t need any view feature, templating and other unused classes will not be loaded, saving up memory and gaining execution speed.
Highly extensible
Due to its relatively simple naming convention and namespace usage, accessing components or integrating new ones is an easy task. Extending the core framework is as easy as dropping files in a directory.
Furthermore, some of Orion’s classes like the database and template classes are using abstraction layers. This means that you can use pretty much any third party engine you want to handle that part for you. For example, while the base framework comes with Smarty as template engine and a custom ORM engine, you could easily write a layer for other projects like Twig or Doctrine. If you do so, feel free to share your code so other people can use it !
Open sourced
The Orion framework is, and ever will be, free and open source. It is dual licensed under the MIT and BSD-4clauses licenses. This means that you have complete access to the source code of the framework (github) and that you can do pretty much anything you want with it.
Being open-sourced, anyone can contribute on the project, meaning that if you have a feature idea or some code you think might be useful for the framework, you can submit it on github and ask for a pull request.
Designed using the M(V)C pattern
Orion is built using the Model, View, Controller (MVC) pattern. But due to its high extensibility and modularity, you can decide whether to use a feature or not. That way, you could build an application using Orion that does not make use of views.
Using up-to-date technology
The Orion framework is written for PHP 5.3+, which means that you have access to the latest, most awesome, code features of PHP like namespaces, late static binding and closures.
Easing end-user access
Orion has some nifty Routing and Context classes built to make end-user access as easy as possible.
It uses server-side URL rewriting to give user-friendly and SEO-friendly access to your modules and controllers.
Secured
The Orion framework comes with some built-in security classes and methods, providing an easy-to-use protection against CSRF and XSS attacks on your web applications.