Comments on: CSS, HTML, and some PHP - part 2

By: Josip

Josip — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:50:51 +0000

Smarty is OK for splitting presentation and logic but can cause a lot of problems later in production environment.
I had alot of problems with smarty cache files, because the technical user has no “write” rights in the production environment. This means – I have to run each and every template on the dev machine (so that the cached templates are created) and copy the cached templates (templates_c) to webserver. If I forget to run a certain page locally (which happens often if you have a big project) this page want be shown - all you will get is the “Unable to write to … directory” smarty error. Because of this you also can’t change smarty templates dynamically with java script (e.g inner HTML). I know, the main cause of this problem are the user access settings from my provider, but this is something what I can’t change so that is why I’m not using smarty templates anymore.

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:49:59 +0000

Rather than inserting directly into your markup, why don’t you separate logic and presentation with a templating engine like Smarty or patTemplate?

Makes everything MUCH cleaner and a great deal simpler when those two layers are clearly separate. It eases maintenance and dealing with unforeseen scalability issues.

I would suggest Smarty, personally. Guarantee that you’ll absolutely fall in love with the concept once you give it a shot.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:24:00 +0000

On large sites I’ll break up the content into more directories. With that said, I try to keep them all on the same level so that I can use the same navigation include for all of my files, including my index page at the root level. I tend to be an organization freak though, so subfolders help me stay sane.

I’ve lately started using ZZ_DONOTUPLOAD, to move that folder to the bottom of my directory listing after partially uploading illustrator and photoshop files one too many times.

By: mattgarvin

mattgarvin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:10:27 +0000

We do things very similarly, and I guess your layout evolved over time like mine did. I am interested in your naming conventions, especially regarding images and class names. Also, do you put “Navigations Items”/”Website Sections” in their own sub-directories, one level deep from the site root, as you do with the other directories?

I too use a “images”, “css”, “includes”, “js” and “donotupload” directory for resources. The only difference is I call “donotupload” something like “_SITEINFO” or “!SITEINFO”, with the first character causing that folder to show up at the top of all directory listings (in Windows Explorer, for instance.)

Good Stuff!

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:24:36 +0000

@Jonathan - thanks

@manu - I’m aware it’s for IE6, which is why the style sheet’s name is ie6_style.css

By: manu

manu — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:11:32 +0000

The conditional is wrong, that’s for IE6 not 7.

Nice stuff btw.

By: Jonathan Cutting

Jonathan Cutting — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:40:00 +0000

The tip about passing a page specific name to the header and using it as the body id is brilliant - thanks!

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:22:49 +0000

I’m glad it helps. I’m working on the rest of this series - so you should see some more over the weekend.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:22:11 +0000

Dude,

Seriously, I’m loving all of this. This is great stuff and very use full.