On 10/7/06, sit1way <sit1way@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hey all. This presents problems in that any updates I make to the CMS only affect the site I'm working on. So, while working on one site I may make changes to the CMS, changes that improve the app., but other older sites do not get updated -- it's OK now, but things are getting sloppy ;--) I would dearly love to have a base CMS repository that all sites would draw on, extending the base CMS in the event that a particular client has need of customization. Some combo of Linux and Apache would do the trick; e.g. PHP requests for any of my sites would point to say, "/home/cms/includes/"
Are you using a version control system? Using one and, maybe, reviewing your architeture for code re-use might help in this matter, I think.... Now, the other issue I'd like to address is separating PHP code logic from
site HTML. (...)
I've often heard the mantra, "separate code from HTML", but it seems
ridiculous at times to include tiny HTML snippets that can easily be echoed out, or stored in a variable. Smarty goes to the extreme in separating code from HTML, but looking at their templating system, I wonder what's the point? Is it the end of the world if you've got a few choice if, then, else statements in your HTML templates?
Is of my understading that this mantra is about intention in the code. We have a framework written in PHP that also uses PHP as template language. I mean, we have source files that define components, where we use PHP to process the data normally (declaring classes, using DB, etc), but there are also "snippet" files were we have HTML + PHP. The special case here is that the snippet files have a couple of arrays with data (created and offered by the components) available and their only occupation is to process output: no DB access, no class declaration, no file inclusion, no socket connection....all they have to do is render HTML (or whatever) with the data they received. The most complex things we have in snippet files are small functions where recursions help displaying some widgets. Everything else are loops, decision strucutres and lots of print/echo. Simple source files, in the end. Thiago Silva
