Site Architecture using Chunky's

[Anon]

Hello All,

I'm about to do a redesign of on one of my sites, I think I'm going to build it in such a way that each of the sites components are built into function's, for example the navigation bar would be:

function NavBar ( $CurLocation )
{
--- nav bar code --
return $html
}

I would create functions for the header, footer, polls... everything.

At the same time i want all the html kept seperate from the php so my designers can do their magic. I also want to have a config file for all the colors, fonts, paths and such. Has anyone built their site like this? If so was it a good idea? was it fast? a link to an example or tutorial would be nice. Thanks in advance.

[Anon]

Instead of designing your own way of doing this or using someone else's homegrown solution, why not use something standards based such as XML/XSL. It has html like syntax that loads in dreamweaver, ect fine and they won't try to modify it. Basically under this architecture, your PHP function you described hold the sole purpose of generating XML documents rather than html pages. After getting the return value of the function ( a string containing the XML doc ) you then apply the appropriate XSL stylesheet.

I have used this on many sites and find it works extremely well. It also is very object-like in that you can reuse stylesheets the same way you do objects throughout your application.

You will need the Sablot extension in stalled if you wish to try it.

G'luck,

Jack

[Anon]

Also, check out phplib.

phplib.netuse.de/

[Anon]

Here are some thoughts:
If you are going have designers working on the html it may be easier to use templates such as the one that comes with phplib which has some articles on the subject at this site.

If you code the html inside the function then every time that html is updated you have to update it within the function which would be a pain. You could use 'include' in side the function to just include the html file that the designers edit which would get around this problem.

Using the function approach however, you have to edit all of your parts (header, footer, main content)separately. If your designers use something like Dreamweaver then they can't easily view the header, footer and any other constant grahpical theme on the page at once. They have to edit it in pieces.

Using templates you can have the header, footer, side navigation, etc in one file that can be edited by your designers in a visual environment and which simply has a {mainContent} tag which is replaced with whatever the content is for that page. I find it to be much easier to maintain and edit. HTML edits don't require any modification to the PHP code and vice versa.

As far as the config file goes I tried using it for fonts and colors before but that didn't last too long. Your pages will always look weird to your designers because they won't have the correct fonts or colors when they edit them. You can use CSS or sometimes a good old fashioned search and replace works great when the time comes to change a font or color on the entire site.

The function approach may be faster than the template approach as far as execution (I haven't done any benchmarks between the two) but if you are caching your templates using something like the caching classes by Jesus Castagnetto available at: http://phpclasses.upperdesign.com/ then this wouldn't matter as much.
Anyhow, I prefer the template approach myself.

Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
www.mangomultimedia.com