Advices on several designs

[Anon]

Hi follows, guys, gals.

I'm writing this thing wich will be a kinda of a portal.

I'm still in planning.

It's supposed to have a users area and each user, in it's config area, can choose from a number of diferent layouts/designs the one he wants to see in the site when he logs in.

What I wana know, is the best way/s to do this. If you guys could give me your opinions, comments and experiences, I'll much thankfull .

Thanks, Zeka

[fordiman]

I'm doing something similar, but a little different.

Right now I've got a site that uses "xxx.style" as a basis for the page output. "root.style" defines, in relatively simple HTML+customtags, the way all the pages should look.

//It grabs root.style
$rootStyle = readfile("root.style");
/then makes it into one big string, parsing the tags as it goes (readfile makes each line an array element)/
$finalOut="";
for ($i=0; $i<sizeof($rootStyle); $i++) {
$a = $rootStyle[$i];
$a = eregi_replace("%%tag%%", $documentContent, $a);
$finalOut .= $a;
}
/ then it outputs the final product /
echo $finalOut;
}

Keep in mind, this is a very basic version (the one I use has a separate parsing section for multi-line conditional tags. I even got help here with that.)