______ _____ _____  _   __ _      _____ _____
               | ___ \_   _/  __ \| | / /| |    |  ___/  ___|
               | |_/ / | | | /  \/| |/ / | |    | |__ \ `--.
               |  __/  | | | |    |    \ | |    |  __| `--. \
               | |    _| |_| \__/\| |\  \| |____| |___/\__/ /
               \_|    \___/ \____/\_| \_/\_____/\____/\____/
       
       PHP Interface Collection of Killer Libraries to Enhance Stuff
===========================================================================

What is PICKLES?
----------------

The whole point behind PHP with PICKLES was for me (Josh Sherman) to take
a decade of PHP experience and a dozen or so of my own websites (all
running on different but similar custom systems of my own design) and build
a new framework rapid development system that would be flexible enough to 
run all of my sites off of a single shared codebase. PICKLES runs in such a
way that the core files are completely separate from the site code it's 
serving. So much so, that the core files should never really need to be 
accessed after installation (unless you want to void your warranty and/or 
make a global change to all of your sites), and each site you have running 
will be nicely packaged in a directory all it's own. This keeps your sites 
simple and tidy with no duplicated code for each site! In a site's 
directory modules (pages) are kept seperate from templates and everything
is ran through a single entry point controller. 

Okay, but why?
--------------

Now I know you're wondering, "why didn't you just use one of the
pre-existing and already established PHP frameworks that are out there?" I
do have a handful of reasons for that, but those are personal gripes based
on a limited number of experiences and I won't being going into detail 
about them. The main reason for developing my own framework is that I am, 
and also have been, a very do it yourself type when it comes to coding, and
typically very proud of my coding accomplishments. Also, because all of the
sites I had previously written shared a lot of the same concepts and in 
some cases, the same bits of code, it made a heck of a lot more sense for 
me to develop a new system based around some of the better concepts from 
previous outings than to rebuild my sites inside of another framework. 

Get the facts!
--------------

Please note that some of these may not be entirely accurate yet.

 * PICKLES will only run on PHP 5.0.0 or greater. There are no plans to 
   ever support PHP 4.x.y (or below) as those versions have reached end of 
   life, so please don't ask.

 * PICKLES is not Model-View-Controller (MVC). It was developed around 
   concepts (as well as some naming conventions) of the MVC design pattern 
   but does not entirely conform to my own understanding of MVC. I'm from 
   the school of thought that there's not a single hammer for every nail, 
   so there's no point in forcing PICKLES into the MVC box for the sake of 
   it. PICKLES strives to provide a modular system for developing websites 
   while keeping the display elements separated from any database calls and 
   other logic. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just meants that 
   PICKLES isn't all that trendy because it lacks a silly buzzword that's a 
   bit overused at this point.

 * PICKLES supports rendering Smarty template pages, returning JSON data 
   and RSS feeds (currently only supports version 2.0) and is fully capable 
   of running from the command line modes.

* PICKLES is coded fairly closely to the PEAR coding standards (sorry, I 
  like my fancy braces inline for class and function definitions) and is 
  fully documented in DocBlock notation.

* Included with PICKLES are shared CSS files (foundation classes and one to 
  do a full CSS reset) and shared JavaScript files with includes a very 
  trim AJAX library that handles a PICKLES-centric JSON object 
  automatically. If your dataset does not fit into that format, custom 
  handlers can be used instead.

* Writing error free code is very important to me, so any PHP development I 
  do is made to be E_STRICT compatible. This means that not only is PICKLES 
  code free of any errors, it is free of warnings as well.

* Depending on your server, any number of sites can be ran off of a single 
  PICKLES install!