I know what you mean.
When I originally started SS Coding with PERL
I used templates for EVERYTHING...
Then i learnt PHP, and integrated HTML into EVERYTHING!
Now I still integrate HTML but differntly.
I have 4 basic PHP files.
_build_start
_build_header
_build_footer
_build_end
start and end are SQL and functions etc...
while header and footer are pure HTML
the only thing between those 4 things is the generated content.
which is pure html output.
but since CSS takes over.
its usually just a <p> and a few <h2><h3> tags etc...
a <strong> and <em> here and there.
Makes life really simple, no templates to deal with!
Joshua Street wrote:
Couldn't agree more. One other suggestion, though, is to extend that
separation a little further by generating XML with PHP, and then parsing
that XML into whatever templating engine you end up using. This just
provides another degree of separation, and reduces the temptation to
hard-code ANY HTML into your back-end... something which I wish I'd been
aware of 6 months ago!
Having your content available in XML will also simplify the presentation
of content in other formats in the future, if you choose to do so --
thinking of syndication (RSS) amongst other things.
From a standards perspective, this separation just reduces the chance of
making some early mistakes which will take ages to correct six months
down the track.
Joshua Street
base10solutions
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On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 09:55, Nick Lo wrote:
Hi Michael,
One thing I'd suggest if you're learning PHP is to from the very start
try as much as possible to avoid having PHP generate your HTML (as in
your example).
I started coding PHP over 4 years ago using an e-commerce system that
generated large amounts of the HTML and I still now have to
occasionally work on it. I can tell you that debugging HTML is a scary
task when it is being generated all over the place. It's a frequent
complaint that database-driven/content-managed/whatever sites produce
horrible HTML because of their "engines".
This is not really the right list for too much discussion on PHP itself
but I'd suggest you separate out your HTML into "templates" which can
be done using template engines as tricky (and some say overkill) as
Smarty or as simple as using <?php echo $whatever; ?> in your HTML. The
important thing being to only allow php code in your HTML that is
responsible for actually generating the HTML. e.g. not database
queries. In fact I was recently doing a quick update on the above
system and realised the one improvement I'd do first would be to
separate out the HTML as much as possible. A great place to get some
idea of the approaches is sitepoint.com PHP forums; search for "php
template" or similar.
I'll not go too far into the nitty-gritties as it could drift
off-topic. I do however think that the way a lot of systems are built
does make building valid standards compliant sites very difficult if
not done carefully.
Nick
... a bit much to ask?
Just wondering if anyone knew of any such tutorials. Those on php.net
seem as if they were written by C programmers wanting to learn php. Yet
those on webmonkey are so old that they still use things like:
echo "<FONT COLOR='red'>Hi there";
Makes it very hard to help HTML newbies (who've learned standards-based
html from the start) learn PHP!
The best I could find was:
http://www.free2code.net/tutorials/programming/php/4/
Introduction_to_PHP.php
Any suggestions welcome!
-Michael
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Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge
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See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
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Proud presenters of Web Essentials 04 http://we04.com/
Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge
To be held in Sydney, September 30 and October 1, 2004
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
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