Introducing Raster

First published in 2014 as “Introducing RasterPHP”. Rewritten in 2026 for Raster 2.

Raster is a PHP framework for websites, not for web apps. Its idea is small: the view is plain HTML, and the parts that change are HTML comments. The comments don’t break the layout or remove the dummy content, so the same file is both the mock-up and the working page. The pattern behind it is RTO: the request picks a template, and the template pulls its data from objects.

A view and a model

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>A list of things</h1>
    <!-- render.tasks.all -->
    <p><!-- print.task_name -->Lorem ipsum<!-- /print.task_name --></p>
    <!-- /render.tasks.all -->
  </body>
</html>

render.tasks.all loads a plain PHP class named tasks and repeats the block once for each row its all method returns:

<?php // application/models/tasks/tasks.php
class tasks {
    function all() {
        return array(
            array('task_name' => 'Walk the dog'),
            array('task_name' => 'Fill in the groceries list'),
            array('task_name' => 'Convince people to use Raster'),
        );
    }
}

The page then lists the three tasks, and “Lorem ipsum” is gone. Models only return data; the view decides how it looks, and every word on the page stays in the template.

The rest, all optional

• A CMS from the markup. Write <!-- print.cms.headline -->Hello<!-- /print.cms.headline --> and the headline is editable on that page. Use render.cms.news instead of your own model and you get a collection with its own URLs, drafts, scheduled posts and pagination. There are no schema files: the templates are the schema.
• Forms. The rules are the HTML attributes you already write (required, type="email", maxlength), checked on the server too. The error messages are blocks in the template that show when a rule fails.
• Accounts, a newsletter, feeds, translations, a page cache and mail, as bundled models that follow the same rule: your templates hold every screen and every email.
• Events. Models tell each other what happened (event::dispatch('reservation.booked', …)) and listen with a listens() method, so the view never wires models together.
• SQL in files. models/tasks/sql/due_today.sql runs as database::instance()->due_today().
• An API. Every public method of your models is also JSON at /api/<model>/<method>.

Why now

The comments-in-HTML idea turns out to suit agents as well as designers. An agent can write a view as ordinary HTML, check it with raster lint, see the content model it created with raster schema, and edit content through the MCP server. AGENTS.md is the whole specification in one file, and the demo café uses every feature, with a test for each.

Raster is not trying to replace Laravel. It is for the many projects that would be crushed under a full framework: a site, a blog, a newsletter, a landing page, a small app.

Get started, or read the code at github.com/draganescu/rasterPHP.