News Templated Site

[Anon]

I'm just about finished with my news templated site (for a major newspaper here).

I'm looking to the future where this package will need to be distributed to other papers; right now it's VERY customised for our papers needs.

I've been looking over production notes from other developers for the past three months, and I'm seeing that function calls through an abstraction layer (just like Tim spoke of in his recent post) will be the best way to make the project portable.

Has anyone worked on a large-scale templating site (with 50+ possible templates, including advertising options, image placement, 'front [section] pages', etc)? I'd be looking to converse with you about some of the headaches you overcame, and some of the headaches I'm currently dealing with.

Thanks!

Chad Edge
[e-mail]

[Anon]

I think my experience is useful here.

One of my projects is a web interface that implements some of our flagship products functionality. This can/must be custimized on a client-by-client basis.

I ended up with the following template directory structure:
/general (header, footer, etc)
/page1
/page2
/page3

I then named the base template for each page as pageX.ihtml so for page1.html I had a page1.ihtml then I had other template pieces for the page in the same directory (table rows, etc.)

On my personal site, I've recently added user defined templates so that users can define the look of the page. To accomplish this, I defined a lot of 'global' template variables and then parsed the requested template using the variables. I believe slashcode does their pages in a similar way.