Mark Kimsal has posted part one of a new series he's working up on creating a virtual host control panel by pairing with PHP a few other technologies.

I still come across a person now and then who does not appreciate the power that any server control panel gives you. [...] They reduce the margin of error that a human can bring to the table when editing files and performing commands "by hand". If host control panels are so good, why would you want to write your own control panel when there are so many out there already? Well, the answer is, there aren't any open source ones.

He talks about starting out right by defining the build and the technology to use and only then gets started coding. His application uses the Cognify framework, SQLite, Nanoweb and, of course, PHP. At the end of this part of the series, you'll have the framework set up and a sample module in place to mess with.

In a new post to his blog, Michael Kimsal points out a post from his brother (Mark) that wonders if your framework handles 404 errors the best/most useful way it can.

This post is about the consistency of frameworks. Consistency is key to a low learning curve. [...] Yesterday, my brother asked me how he could capture 404 errors in Cognifty, as he was building an app that relied on dealing with random URL patterns. [...] After talking for a bit, we decided that handing off the request to a standard service (or controller) was the best way to handle this type of "error". He started searching to see if other frameworks had a consistent, or at least documented, way of dealing with missing controllers.

In his research he found one framework - the Zend Framework - that handed them by default as an error and passed them off to that handler. Mark notes that, depending on your frame of reference, this may or may not be considered a true error.

His Cognifty framework handles things a bit differently. It allows you to change the presentation handler to redirect to another url if an error like a 404 is thrown - a technically "more correct" way of handling things.