Industry best practice

spstieng

I read JF1980s question about Templates or not. And got a few of my questions answered.

I am new to PHP but not new to programming. I am currently converting two webpages from HTML to PHP. When programming I want to be as structured as possible, and be as OO as possible. I want to reuse elements instead of writing them several times. To accomplish this I have started to build my own PHP files that contains functions for creating certain types of tables, reading files and use of databases.

I want to separate code from UI. But it seems like no matter what I do, I still construct a lot of HTML code / tags in my PHP code. Doesn't that kind of ruin the notion of separating code from UI?

What do you guys, who do this professionally, do when creating websites? What do you consider good practice when coding PHP?

Thanks.

DigitalExpl0it

I want to separate code from UI. But it seems like no matter what I do, I still construct a lot of HTML code / tags in my PHP code. Doesn't that kind of ruin the notion of separating code from UI?

you going to have to have html or how else is the web broswer going to read the code?

web browsers dont know how to read server side scripting like php/asp etc..

php is here for use of things that you cannot do with html. It helps fill in all the things html just cant do.

you will have to use html with php, but you will limit the html code.

Example:
if you have a database and you connect to it with php and display all the the records then all you have to do is basicly print/echo out the fields into a html table just one table data, then look that one table data / table row

and it will automaticly build the table from that one tr/td

so it helps on less html coding but depending on what you do you will still have alot of html code but its more advanced with php behind it

Natty_Dreadlock

U can do it on different levels:
Maybe it's enough to have some doHeader() and doFooter() functions that insert your navigation etc.
For sure, u might write function for every format (which will be a lot of work and a lot of code).
Maybe - if u r at least a little familiar with xml - , u can create some more abstract xml documents for your pages (i.e. <highlight> which resolves to <b><font color="red"> etc.), so that u r able to modify the look-and-feel of every tag easily.
When u made some decision, ask for more details here.
hth

jimson

wddx might help