*Hey WSG,*
I have just begun re-development of neester.com once again.
This time because my server switched Magic Quotes on... Which is good!
But all my old scripting had addslashes etc... and it just became really dodgy etc...
It was a good excuse to redevelop it again.
If you goto www.neester.com you will see a grey page.
I have used my own styleswitcher which I think is very efficent and well - its pretty cool how it all works.
I will explain it here now - and I will write an article when I am finished with the site...
BTW I know I could of used Lorium Ipsum - but Google will get annoyed and think its /latin/, happened before.
Ok.
What happens is, once you load the page - the PHP inside index.php sets the stylesheet location in the HEADER to:
> link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/d_index_default.css"
title="Neester.Com | Default Style" media="all" type="text/css"
See how the location is d_index_default.css
Well, that basically means, it loads the default stylesheet, for the index page, with the colour: default...
If you click on a different style on the page, say Green...
that will then become:
> link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/d_index_green.css"
title="Neester.Com | Default Style" media="all" type="text/css"
Each page also changes the link... eg - if i had the contact page working. The link inside that would be:
> link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/d_contact_default.css"
title="Neester.Com | Default Style" media="all" type="text/css" or if you are still using green
> link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/d_contact_green.css"
title="Neester.Com | Default Style" media="all" type="text/css"
Now I dont actually have 100,000 stylesheets for all these.
I am using .htaccess to redirect these connections to a single PHP CSS file...
I cant include the whole file here, but here is an algorithm of how it works is below...
The PHP loads with about 100 variables (colours, margins, paddings, background images, fonts etc...)
Then the PHP has a "switch" function - which deterimines WHICH colour you are loading...
Then it resets some of the 100 variables - to suit that style...
THEN it echo's the DEFAULT styles to the browser...
Then it has another SWITCH, which it echo's only that PAGES RELEVANT styles...
eg:
contact page would have:
#contact_form input,#contact_form select,#contact_form textarea
{
blah...
}SOOOOOO
In effect.
The browser sees 4 stylesheets per page if you go through each of the styles...
And it will cache them too - because they actually have a real path (.htaccess just modifies it when it gets to the server)...
So it will run asif I have 100 stylesheets...
but in effect, i only have one!
adding those 4 styles has been a breeze. I just added about 20 lines to each of the STYLES SWITCH function points... And yeah - because you only edit the styles you want to change. The rest can stay default (margins for example...)
*If you are more interested, I can send you the PHP code for this.
I dont mind if other people use this method - I would like it if you gave me credit.
but yeah.
I havent seen it used anywhere else - but then again - I didn't really look. if you have seen this method used somewhere else - please post some links... Cheers!
*Hope that wasnt too long...
And I hope it is easy to understand - and someone out there learnt something they might use...
*
*--
------------------------
Chris Stratford
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.neester.com
------------------------
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