Aura has an awesome collection of libraries for different purpose.

It has components for authentication, cli, request and response, router, dependency injection container, dispatcher, html, view, event handlers, validation, extended pdo, query builders, sql schema, marshal, build and modify uri, http, internationalization, session, forms, includer.

If you are new to aura, there is probably something you may want to figure out yourself.

Some of the components have version 1 and version 2 releases. There is a question of which branch corresponds to which version.

The v1 packages are in develop branch and v2 over develop-2 branch.

There are a few changes in v1 to v2. It is easy to understand when you look into the composer.json or if you know aura v2 follows psr-4 directory structure than the v1 that followed psr-0.

If you see a package "aura/installer-default": "1.0.0" in the require of composer.json it is for sure v1.

Composer installs every package in the vendor folder. The name of the package installed will be the package name. So basically it installs vendor/aura/<package-name> .

In aura framework v1 we have some specific folder structure and it was before composer becomes a standard. So when composer became a standard we added a way to install the framework specific installations in package folder and the rest of the library installation (other than aura framework) in the same way as composer did.

So was the existence of aura/installer-default in v1 package. In v2 we moved to composer assisted two stage configuration.

v2 Framework

There exists a micro framework/full stack framework for v2. But things are hard to find when you are new to aura and when github organization have more than 30 repositories.

[Aura framework]((https://github.com/auraphp/Aura.Framework_Project) is built on top of aura libraries, and the library docs applies to the framework also. But people new to aura may be having hard time to find the specific documentation or may be stuck sometime. I don’t know whether my thoughts are right or wrong.

Documentation is one of the hardest problem when newer versions are released. Say 1.0.0 released, 1.1.0 … although the documentation is there in the installed repo, it is probably hard to make things online.

I was talking with Paul M Jones regarding the documentation lately, and he too shared some concerns. Talking with him gave me some inspiration to start the missing manual for the aura framework.

Goal

• let people read and learn
• promote aura with good documentation
• at the sametime, to make a living

Yes, I am independent freelance php developer. It was a sad story that I don’t want to recall how I became a freelancer by chance.

Before my freelancing, I was down for a few months, not physically but mentally which has impacted my life with some ups and downs. But now I really love working as an independent contractor.

About the book

You can find the book over github licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

The book is available free to read online. If you find a typo, or feel something can be improved open an issue or send a pull request .

If you find it interesting you should consider buying a copy from leanpub to show your support to the project.

Thank you.