The Front Office

We know how the system acts from the HTTP request to the controller instantiation, both for front office (FO) and back office (BO) controllers. Understanding the behavior of a front controller will make things easier to understand when we have to create our own modules also containing some kinds of front controllers.

We will follow this process to discover how things are done:

• Discovering how an FO controller works
• Using the model
• Using the views from the theme

By the end of this chapter, we will have mastered how a front controller works and the details of its life cycle, how object model child objects are manipulated, how theme templates are called, and how objects are assigned to Smarty views.

Let’s see how things work from the FO instantiation to the view display on the browser.