Model, view, controller (also: even more acronyms 🤔)

Repository: mvc
Type of Challenge: Learning
Duration: 2-3 days
Team challenge : solo

The mission

MVC is one of the typical acronyms in programming. It's a structure that will split your project into different files with a clear responsibility for each:

Models are classes that contain data. They usually correspond to a table from your database.
Views are files that will mostly contain HTML. Any user facing end result will be made here.
Controllers are classes responsible to control the handling of a request: they will load the right models and provide them to the correct view.

Why all this hassle? Can't I just get the data I need in the index? The answer is simple: yes, you can^*.

🌱 Must-have features

Step 1: have a look around

First, read the code provided in the starter pack. It's well documented with comments. Try to follow the track of the homepage. Can you follow the path to the view?

Know what you Google for: modal or model? A modal is a popup window, a model is part of the MVC structure. Or your future boy/girlfriend.

Step 2: preparation

For this exercise, you'll need a database with an articles table. Add three fields:

title (VARCHAR, 255)
description (TEXT)
publish_date (DATETIME)

Discover the writer in yourself and provide some dummy content. (childhood stories allowed)

Step 3: showtime

The homepage from the starter pack works and provides a link to the articles page. The articles > index view contains a nice overview of the articles, but does not have the data. Finish all the TODO's in the controller to provide the required info.

🌼 Nice to have (doable)

Provide a detail page to show all content from an article.
Add previous/next links to an article detail page.
Can you find any info that would make sense to a function in the article model? There's a hint in the spoiler below.
An article right now is pretty dry. Make it stand out by adding the related database properties, or upgrading the existing ones. (example: a url to an image)

Hint for the article model

The url is a good example of something related to an article that you might need multiple times. Moving this to a function in that model will make possible future changes to it *way* easier. Can you spot in your future code?

🌳 Nice to have (hard)

Expand the database and models with an author. Each article should have an author. The article title should be shown in the following format A guide on building your own rocket - By Elon Musk.
Make a detail page for an author, listing all his/her articles on that page.

^* This will not prepare you for frameworks however, which make heavy usage of the MVC pattern^**

^** Alright, then... is there always a catch? The answer is simple: yes.

Best of luck! I hope you'll be able to end with these famous words:

becodeorg / verou-5-mvc-Xzanderzone