Welcome to the series of posts which helps you understand Agile Toolkit if you are coming from one of the other PHP Frameworks.
This post focuses on developers who are already familiar with CI (Code Igniter) and are willing to try Agile Toolkit.
Agile Toolkit now includes the ability to put all it’s PHP classes into a single file. This way you would only need to distribute one file along with your application.
Bundle would only contain classes from “atk4″, so add-ons will not be bundled. Clever minds should be able to extend the bundler to pack add-ons they require along with their own classes.
As a result, you can have all your PHP in one or two classes. To create the bundle you need most recent copy of Agile Toolkit (4.1.1+ would do) and Unix shell. Execute:
./atk4/tools/mkbundle.sh
Will produce atk4/atk4-bundle.php and also atk4/atk4-bundle.min.php. Replace your include for atk4/loader.php for ‘atk4/atk-bundle.php’ and everything should continue to work. You can then remove atk4/lib.
Please note that Agile Toolkit contains images, styles and JavaScript files which are not minified by this process.
With increasing popularity of Agile Toolkit, I’m getting more requests from volunteers and people who want to actively learn it. While forum and community portal is still in our short-term plans, we are now using chat.stackoverflow.com for daily communication.
http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/2966/agile-toolkit-atk4
You would need to register with stack overflow and get some reputation if you want to chat, so be sure to ask a couple of “atk4″ questions (or answers) http://stackoverflow.com/tags/atk4
For all of you who have tried version 4.0.3 and have been stuck with it for a while, now it’s the right time to upgrade. There are a lot of new features and I’ll try to quickly go over the ones which are most important.
More and more pages are being added into a “Learning Agile Toolkit” book. The section explaining the fundamentals of Agile Toolkit is mostly complete:
http://new.agiletoolkit.org/learn/understand
The most recent addition was JavaScript chains section and Models section.
