h-source is the PHP software used to create h-node.org. The h-source source code is hosted at Savannah.

At the moment, there is no stable releases but you can clone the git repository:

git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/h-source.git

h-node.org pulls from the h-node branch weekly. There is also a staging instance that tracks the development branch daily.

h-source has been developed using the EasyGiant PHP framework. The EasyGiant PHP framework forces the developer to adopt the MVC (model-view-controller) paradigm. According to this paradigm each web page served is managed by a Controller, a Model and one or more View files.

For example, the URL of this page is the following:

http://www.h-node.org/wiki/page/en/h-source

We can split the above URL in four parts

1. http://www.h-node.org -> the domain name
2. wiki -> the controller, that is a PHP class
3. page -> the public method of the controller used to serve this page
4. en/h-source -> the query string, a list (separated by /) of arguments passed to the page public method of the wiki controller

Inside the source code of h-source you can download, you will find the following file:

Application/Controllers/WikiController.php

It is the PHP class associated with the wiki controller mentioned above. That file has a public method named page, which require two arguments (passed in the query string: en/h-source) In this way, it is easy to find the PHP file that is serving the page you have requested. This page is served by the WikiController.php PHP class by means of the page public method

For each Controller (in this case wiki -> WikiController.php) there is also a Model and one or more view files.

The model manages database queries, inserting new data to the database, updating old data and retrieving some data. Each model is a PHP class. All model classes are saved inside the Application/Models folder. Each model manages a single database table. In this case, the WikiModel.php file, the model PHP class, is used to manage the wiki MySQL table.

The view files are simple PHP files that contain the HTML code that forms the web page, mixed with some simple PHP instructions. All the logic is written inside the controller (WikiController.php) and the model (WikiModel.php).

All the view files used by a controller are saved inside the folder Application/Views or Application/Views/<controller>, where <controller> is the controller name. The view files placed inside Application/Views can be used by all controllers while the view files saved inside Application/Views/<controller> can be used only by the controller named <controller>.

So, in the case of the wiki (WikiController.php) controller, all view files are placed inside a folder:

Application/Views/Wiki

The view file that serves the content of this page is Application/Views/Wiki/page.php