The files of the blog are distributed to six folders: (1) content stores variable data for each blog installation, (2) controller contains PHP scripts that descide how to process HTTP requests, (3) model contains PHP classes that reflect the content, (4) script contains JavaScripts required by the user interface, (5) theme contains Cascading Stylesheets and images for the user interface, and (6) view contains PHP scripts that generate the HTTP responses.
The content folder mainly contains the article folder, which stores the individual blog articles.
Each blog article is represented by a folder whose name contains the article date and id (e.g. 2009_02_11_personal_website_launched).
This folder contains the article.xml file and other documents such as images or PDFs.
The XML file provides information about the article headline, tagline and content.
Typically, the content section refers to the attached documents.
The controller folder currently only contains a single script called main.php. The purpose of the script is to load the content using the model classes and to redirect the HTTP request to the respective view. Further, for raw content such as images or PDF documents the correct file path is derived using a base path and the request URL.
The model folder currently contains three classes: (1) Database represents the root of the content model, (2) Article represents a blog article with direct access to headlines, taglines, content and attached documents, and (3) File represents attached documents. The class implementations typically use file system operations and the SimpleXML API for loading the stored content.
The script folder currently contains JavaScript files for (1) the Dashboard image slideshow and (2) the four different blog interfaces (Calendar, Cover, Tile, Timeline). Scripts (and theme) are separated from content to make it possible to exchange content while keeping appearance and interactivity.
The theme folder contains (1) images and (2) Cascading Stylesheets. Through separating theme files from content it is possible to have several blog installations run the same theme with different content. It is intended to install themes by checking out a respective theme SVN repository.
The view folder currently contains scripts for (1) the header and footer (reused by other views), (2) the index (also called Dashboard) and article pages, (3) the RSS feed, and (4) the error page. Further, scripts are provided for specific files extensions such as JPEG or PDF. In particular, the image extension scripts provide functionality to rescale and crop image files. Finally, the folder interface contains the views for the different blog interfaces (Calendar, Cover, Tile, Timeline).
These files are currently all that is required for running a simple PHP/XML blog. If you are interested you can access the entire sources via the public SVN repository: http://svn.hyperkit-software.com/personalblog/.