In his latest post Paul Jones looks at the more legacy structure of "page controllers" (a site based on several pages rather than an MVC style) that was common before the "MVC revolution" in the PHP community years back.

Almost all of the legacy applications I’ve had to deal with were page-based. In doing the work to modernize them, there comes a time where the page script has been refactored to look very much like a page controller, with some distinct but not critical differences. As such, I have come to consider the typical PHP page script to be a degenerate form of a page controller. With a little imagination, I think it’s easy to see why.

He talks about how, in this older situation, the web server becomes a sort of "simplified front controller+router+dispatcher" and the PHP page acts as a "controller". He suggests that, even though this structure isn't as well separated as an MVC application, it can still be organized to make it easier to maintain.