Stop torchering yourself. I’ve done this too many times, and I think it’s time to shed a little light into the web design world. Do you have experience with php? If you do, I heavily suggest you create a system similar to mine.
The gist: You have a php include file with a bunch of functions to echo content. Then, once you’ve created a template php file with all of the functions in the correct places echoing the correct stuff, create the site.
Why? Let’s say you find a template you like, or just make a mistake in your custom edited template php/html file. Now, it turns out that 8 hours later you discover that you made a mistake and you’ll have to redo all of those dozens of pages. Or maybe you’re like me and just want to keep adding navigation links left and right – then remembering that you’ll have to redit and reupload every single file.
You get the idea. Here’s what one of my sites looks like:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 | <?php require_once("page.php"); ?> <html> <link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> <head> <title> </title> </head> <body> <?php logo(); ?> <div id="wrap"> <?php menu(); ?> <div id="container"> <?php sidebar(); ?> <div id="mainbox"> <div id="text"> <div id="midbar"> <div id="midbartxt"> Text </div> </div> <div id="midbaritm"> <div id="text"> Some text </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <?php footer(); ?> </body> </html> |
You can see how this is working, right? Well here’s what the page.php file looks like anyway
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 | <?php function logo() { echo '<div id="logo">Logo</div>'; } function menu() { echo <<<EOF <div id="menu"> <div id="link">Hello <div id="link">Hello again </div> EOF; } function sidebar() { echo <<<EOF <div id="sidebar"> <div id="text"> Ello </div> </div> EOF; } function footer() { echo <<<EOF <div id="copy">© their respective owners.</div> EOF; } ?> |
Seeing the potential benefits yet? Yes? Then go spread the word and implement something like this yourself. It is such a headache to manually edit every single page all over again just to add another navigation link. Just edit page.php or something similar and have the changes appear across all pages.
- You’re welcome.
February 12th, 2009 at 9:04 am
I also use that… except that to make it easier for me to remember the function names (and for consistency issues), I use the same function with one parameter.
Example:
function gen ($number)
{
switch ($number)
{
case 1 :
echo “stuff… mostly headers and meta tags”;
break;
case 2 :
echo “some more stuff…”
break;
}
}
Implementation:
One of the cons is that this method has less flexibility, since it seems like the page content is “locked” inside “editable regions” in the template defined in gen() function.
By the way congrats for the Java version of KoL
February 12th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Hmm… seems like the comments filter blocked off some of my stuff.
What I meant was:
Implementation:
//Page start
gen(1);
echo “some page content”;
gen(2);
//Page end