What are these monolog, Slim and Twigs?

Thanks a lot Kevin

Do you think this is the right way to introduce PHP to beginners? There is a way to make CMS without using OOP or frameworks, maybe it should be starting point to understand the concept and then show OOP and various frameworks.

I don't know, to be honest. I'm not a teacher, and I haven't studied learning patterns. I do know I learned PHP without OOP, frameworks, or other tools, and spent some time coding 100% from scratch. Good for learning but I didn't build much.

I think there is a fine balance to be considered. If you start a new person off with too much of a from scratch perspective, they won't understand why they're learning what they are learning. Sure, you could teach me all about classes and constructors, but if I don't understand how they fit in the big picture of a web app, I could loose interest.

The other imbalance is using framework and tools too heavily to where I know how to use a slim class, but I have no idea how the class actually works. Which means I can't do anything outside of what I can get pre-built for me, and that's not good either.

People also learn differently, so there is no perfect answer. But i think it's important to find a blend of quickly scaling apps so you see the big picture, and feel accomplished, while slowly understanding the intricate parts of the language.

But wouldn't creating this code yourself be more efficient as it would have no unnecessary code?

Maybe, maybe not Nick.

If you knew what you were doing, you might be able to write something faster. That's a possibility, sure. It would also be possible to write something slower even if it was less code. One thing you gain from these tools is you get to leverage a lot of work from other people, for free. For instance, Slim right now has 1,422 commits and 97 contributors. Another benefit is the security side of it.

It would be hard for a small team, to build the same functionality, lighter and faster. Picking the right tool is important however. Don't use Laravel when you Slim or Lumen can provide all you need.

It makes sense for small teams to build upon these platforms. Later, if your site scales you may find yourself need to rewrite off to a custom framework. But at that point you would have the resources and people to make that possible.

They have their place, they just need to be use be used responsibly. I think you have more to gain optimizing the front end.

Lumen says that slim 3 can handle 1800 request per second, and Lumen 1900. That's pretty speedy as is.

Yeah, some parts of it aren't well-explained.

Why not follow along using Slim 2? You don't have to use the latest version if you're not ready for it yet.

It's not silly, not the least bit. A few points to think about, and then you can make your own decision.

1. Frameworks are generally structured the same. Even among different languages. I haven't looked heavily at Slim 3, but core concepts (i.e. best practices) will remain. Sure, some things depreciated, some things added, maybe the structure of the framework changed, but there are a lot of core principles to learn

2. Somewhat contradicting to that is the effort and cost to move an actual existing site to an updated framework. In the real world, you will likely run into "outdated" versions of frameworks. Many companies, especially smaller companies might not see the ROI or have the time to update from Slim 2 to Slim 3. This means you as a developer must be capable of understand the core concepts of the framework, and the differences between them.

3. It gives you the opportunity to test yourself as a developer. You're frustrated trying to do this Slim 2 course in Slim 3. Use this as your benchmark, take the Slim 2 course with Slim 2, than use what you learned, and your documentation reading skills to build it again in Slim 3. See how much easier it is.

This is exactly what I did with the Laravel 4 lessons here, building the app again in Laravel 5 on my own after. Or the social media app Treebook here in Rails 3, where I tried to rebuild it in Rails 4.

I think you'll learn more, than just following a straight up Slime 3 course.

Legacy code is always a problem. Learning legacy frameworks is never a waste of time in my humble opinion. Wishing you the best.