Helium is a light-weight PHP MVC framework that is designed to be painless to install, simple to use, and highly extensible and scalable. It is built for a standard LAMP stack and is installable and configurable from the command line on most linux distros.

The genesis of this framework is rooted in utility. I wanted to have an easy to deploy and easy to develop core that wasn't bloated with a litany of extras that I didn't want or need. So, instead of taking an existing framework and stripping it down, I decided to write a framework from the ground up. This allowed me to take care in how it is engineered, maintaining speed and efficiency as much as possible.

Anyone! Even those without extensive web development backgrounds can use it, so long as they have a modest understanding of PHP. Out of the box, it comes ready for deployment, and the basic method for creating new pages and services couldn't be simpler: Create a new route and controller, and put your content in the primary template file. It couldn't be simpler.

The most recent release of Helium is version 3.1, made available on December 27, 2012

From the command line:

• wget http://repo.phphelium.com/keys/helium.gpg.key http://repo.phphelium.com/apt/debian/helium.list
• apt-key add helium.gpg.key
• mv helium.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
• apt-get install helium-base

Or you can download:

• Download v3.1
• GitHub
• Google Code
• SourceForge