each one of my pages shares the common.css stylesheet but then nearly every other page has its own custom stylesheet and this is the same for javascript files.
My main template file is in this sort of format (obviously the real one has more html in it):
<html>
<head>
<title><?php echo $this->data['title']; ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo $this->data['content']; ?>
</body>
I was thinking of doing it this way:
When I create the view object in the controller I could add the required files (in an array) to the view object so then they could be accessed in the main template like $this->data['css'] and $this->data['javascript'] and I could loop through the arrays in the main template to output them in the <head> of the page.
Is this an okay way to do it or is it breaking some rules or bad practice? Thanks.
It is totally okay, though I advice you to write yourself a asset() method in order to prepend your basepath before filename [e.g. http://yoursite.com/web/] so your code is more portable an deploying is easier.
As Fluffeh said consider compressing your whole styles in a single file for better performance - check YUI compressor for example.
Related
As the title says, is there a way to edit a portion of an entire site with one code or page? For example, if the bottom of every page of a site said "2014", is there a way in html or css to change every page of the site to say "2015" without having to do so manually to each individual page?
I understand this can be done in php, and I understand that a server can be configured for html to read php code. Are there any flaws to this method (perhaps the html page will load slower if it's configured to read php)? Are there any other ways to do this besides using php code?
Performance Concern:
You will not see any performance difference between having PHP render basic HTML and typing the HTML yourself.
The performance impact is only noticeable on HUGE PHP applications. And even then, it's still very fast.
What you ask is common practice. This is an example of what you can do.
Make a file called index.php and put this inside:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<!--Your head stuff-->
</head>
<body>
<header><?php require_once 'header.html' ?></header>
<section class="main_content"><h2>My Page!</h2></section>
<footer><?php require_once 'footer.html' ?></footer>
</body>
</html>
Make a file called header.html and put this inside:
<h2>This is my header</h2>
Make a file called footer.html and put this inside:
<h2>This is my footer</h2>
As you can see, the practice is to use any of the built-in PHP functions to include other files in your PHP file:
include 'some_file.php';
require 'some_file.php';
require_once 'some_file.php';
I think Dreamweaver can do this, with its find and replace entire website property
Assuming all pages have a CSS file in common, you can use the content CSS property of a pseudo element like before or after to control content across all pages.
For example:
#footer:before {content:'2015';}
<div id="footer"></div>
I apologize of this question has been asked before. I tried searching around, but was unable to find a relevant answer (probably due to my relatively small "web-design vocabulary").
I've noticed that the majority of websites have at least one--if not more--standard "objects" (or whatever the actually name is for them) on almost all of their pages. For instance, Stack Overflow has the same logo and tabs (Questions, Tags, Users...) on every page. I'm assuming that there's a less painstaking way to set this up other than simply copying and pasting the same code over and over, especially when ease of modification becomes a factor. As far as I know, CSS can't do accomplish this level of style generalization, so I'm assuming a server-sided language like PHP is part of the equation.
I'm not really looking for a very specific answer. What language--or type or language--as well as a brief synopsis of at least one way to achieve some sort of "object pasting" will be sufficient.
Like others said, this is a major reason why people go from HTML to something like PHP, at first just to split up parts of your page.
Yes, you can do exactly that. What I usually do (if I'm not using a framework) is create a folder in my directory like this:
inc/header.php
inc/footer.php
inc/menu.php
index.php
Then in index.php you'd need an include like:
<? include('inc/header.php'); ?>
<h2>Welcome to my site</h2>
<p>We're happy to have you</p>
<? include('inc/footer.php'); ?>
And in inc/header.php:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My site</title>
</head>
<body>
And in inc/footer.php:
<div id="footer">
<h2>Thanks for visiting</h2>
</div>
</body>
</html>
And so on for inc/menu.php
Then for other pages on your site, do the same includes for header, footer, and menu, and just write your page-specific content between the includes
Just an alternative to PHP:
Use Javascript or jQuery.
$( "#footer" ).load( "includes/footer.html" );
Another alternative is to use SHTML, which is basically HTML with inserts.
An easy way to do this is to create separate files for different sections of your page then instead of pasting the same code on each page use
include ('yourfilename.php');
to add the code in yourfilename.php at that point in the php file. This also makes it easy to modify that section and have your changes be reflected on all the pages that use yourfilename.php
For example, you can make one file called page_top.php and another called page_bottom.php. Then on each of your various php pages you can include('page_top.php'); near the top and include('page_bottom.php'); near the bottom. The code within these files will then be executed on each of your content pages.
There are of course other methods but this is a super easy way and you should look into this first.
An example of include would be:
header.php
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<stuff><stuff>
</head>
<body>
<div id="mybanner">Design and logo that is common on all pages</div>
content/contact.php
<div id="bulk_of_the_html">
The rest of your stuff goes here
</div>
foot.php
<div id="footer_common_to_all">This is your footer content that is common to all pages</div>
</body>
</html>
To use would be something like:
contact.php
// This is your common to all pages header
include("header.php");
// This can be changed up as content switches
include("content/contact.php");
// This is your common to all pages footer
include("foot.php");
HTML imports or Webcomponents is a new way to do this completely at client side using HTML, JS and CSS. Write a component and reuse it in every page. But it uses ShadowDom, means not search indexable yet.
<link rel="import" href="header-banner.html">
<!-- use this in body -->
<header-banner></header-banner>
You have two solutions
Use include('....php') or require('....php') or include_once('....php') or require_once('....php') php functions to add external sections/modules into your web page(php).
You can call this functions at the position where you want the extremal module/part to be appeared.
include("Header.php"); // call to external module
// your body goes here
<h1>.......</h1>
<p>........</p>
.....................
include("Footer.php"); // again to another module
Or its better if you can go for a MVC framework where you can combine multiple modules and views into one output page...(ex Codeignitor/Cakephp...)
I've been reading on this quite some time...and i'm puzzled -
Can you help on what is the difference between:
Yii::app()->clientScript->registerCssFile(Yii::app()->baseUrl.'/css/some-file.css');
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo Yii::app()->request->baseUrl; ?>/css/some-file.css
Is it a performance issue, or just different syntax?
Thanks,
Danny
registerCssFile always registers the file between the <head> tags, even if you call it somewhere in a view.
This is helpful if you care about HTML validation (a <link> in <body> is invalid), but still want to include a CSS file in a view.
registerCssFile actually aids performance, because the CSS is registered only when you want it (and need it).
The way you are using it, it is identical. To verify this, check the source of the page (in your browser) and check the statement that Yii::app()->clientScript->registerCssFile creates.
However, clientScript lets you control the position of the script in the HTML file. Check out: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CClientScript#registerScriptFile-detail and look for POS_HEAD, POS_BEGIN, POS_END.
What is probably more important is this: In the MVC philosophy, you want to have everything related to HTML-output in your view-file. Yii::app()->clientScript lets you add CSS and JS files from within your view files. And that is where you want it.
I created a custom PHP templating system and the way I built it seems, well, inefficient. The three main goals for my template was to:
Pull all site-wide HTML elements from a template.tpl include.
Be able to dynamically assign content in the template.tpl (like <title> or <script>)
Be as efficient and scalable as possible.
In the end, my template system looked something like this:
randomPage.php
<?php
// declare any page specific resources
$pageTitle = "Random Sub-Title";
$pageResources = "/css/someRandomCSS.css"
$pageContent = "/randomPage.tpl"
// include the generic page template
include dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']).'/includes/template.tpl'
?>
randomPage.tpl
<h1><?=$pageTitle?></h1>
<p>Some random page's content</p>
template.tpl
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>My Site -- <?=$pageTitle?></title>
<link href="/css/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="<?=pageResources?>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
<? include $pageContent ?>
</body>
</html>
The main problem with this system is that for every web page, I need to manage two files: one for logic/data and the other for the page template. This seems largely inefficient to me, and doesn't seem like a very scalable approach.
Recently, I come across the smarty framework, which would allow me to consolidate my system from randomPage.php and randomPage.tpl into something like:
randomSmartyPage.php
{extends file="template.tpl"}
{block name=pageTitle}My Page Title{/block}
{block name=pageResources}
<link href="/css/someRandomCSS.css" rel="stylesheet" text="text/css">
{/block}
{block name=pageContent}My HTML Page Body goes here{/block}
Seeing this approach raised three major questions for me:
Are there any fundamental flaws with how I am approaching my templating system?
Can my original php code be refactored so I don't have to create two files for every web page?
Would using the smarty (or perhaps an alternative framework) be a good idea in this case?
Your code isn't really using any templating engine besides PHP itself, which is fine. A flaw I can see is your template will have access to all variables, and the ones you create for it are all global.
Two files is a good system, one to change what is preprocessed and passed to the view, and one for the view itself, containing HTML or whatever. This allows you to easily swap views, for example, a view for standard browsing and a mobile view for mobile browsers.
It can be a good idea, but I'm a firm believer that using PHP is good enough.
Here is an example, untested. It will encapsulate all the variables so you don't pollute the global namespace.
index.php
function view($file, $vars) {
ob_start();
extract($vars);
include dirname(__FILE__) . '/views/' . $file . '.php';
$buffer = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
return $buffer;
}
echo view('home', array('content' => Home::getContent()));
views/home.php
<h1>Home</h1>
<?php echo $content; ?>
The approach you are describing is part of MVC design pattern. Separating the different aspects of your application.
What you seem to have already understood is that PHP is a templating system in itself as have many others before you.
Take a look at this benchmark for a rough comparison of popular template systems.
Update 2022.08.29
Updated broken links to archived versions.
Note: The answer remains valid if you're trying to learn the language. But for anything serious, consider using a framework.
Most HTML in a large website is duplicated across pages (the header, footer, navigation menus, etc.). How do you design your code so that all this duplicate HTML is not actually duplicated in your code? For example, if I want to change my navigation links from a <ul> to a <ol>, I'd like to make that change in just one file.
Here's how I've seen one particular codebase handle this problem. The code for every page looks like this:
print_top_html();
/* all the code/HTML for this particular page */
print_bottom_html();
But I feel uncomfortable with this approach (partially because opening tags aren't in the same file as their closing tags).
Is there a better way?
I mostly work with PHP sites, but I'd be interested in hearing solutions for other languages (I'm not sure if this question is language-agnostic).
I'm not a php programmer, but I know we can use a templating system called Smarty that it works with templates(views), something like asp.net mvc does with Razor.
look here http://www.smarty.net/
One solution at least in the case of PHP (and other programming languages) is templates. Instead of having two functions like you have above it would instead be a mix of HTML and PHP like this.
<html>
<head>
<title><?php print $page_title ?></title>
<?php print $styles ?>
<?php print $scripts ?>
</head>
<body>
<div id="nav">
<?php print $nav ?>
</div>
<div id="content">
<?php print $content ?>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Each variable within this template would contain HTML that was produced by another template, HTML produced by a function, or also content from a database. There are a number of PHP template engines which operate in more or less this manner.
You create a template for HTML that you would generally use over and over again. Then to use it would be something like this.
<?php
$vars['nav'] = _generate_nav();
$vars['content'] = "This is the page content."
extract($vars); // Extracts variables from an array, see php.net docs
include 'page_template.php'; // Or whatever you want to name your template
It's a pretty flexible way of doing things and one which a lot of frameworks and content management systems use.
Here's a really, really simplified version of a common method.
layout.php
<html>
<body>
<?php echo $content; ?>
</body>
</html>
Then
whatever_page.php
<?php
$content = "Hello World";
include( 'layout.php' );
Sounds like you need to use include() or require()
<?php
include("header.inc.php");
output html code for page
include("footer.inc.php");
?>
The header and footer files can hold all the common HTML for the site.
You asked for how other languages handle this, and I didn't see anything other than PHP, so I encourage you to check out Rails. Rails convention is elegant, and reflects #codeincarnate 's version in PHP.
In the MVC framework, the current view is rendered inside of a controller-specific layout file that encapsulates the current method's corresponding view. It uses a "yield" method to identify a section where view content should be inserted. A common layout file looks like this:
<html>
<head>
<% #stylesheet and js includes %>
<body>
<div id="header">Header content, menus, etc…</div>
<%= yield %>
<div id="footer">Footer content</div>
</body>
</html>
This enables the application to have a different look and feel or different navigation based on the controller. In practice, I haven't used different layout files for each controller, but instead rely on the default layout, which is named "application".
However, let's say you had a company website, with separate controllers for "information", "blog", and "admin". You could then change the navigation for each in a clean and unobtrusive manner by handling the different layout views in their respective layout files that correspond to their controllers.
You can always set a custom layout in the controller method by stating:
render :layout => 'custom_layout'
There are also great helper methods built into Rails so you don't have to rely on $global variables in PHP to ensure your CSS and Javascript paths are correct depending on your development environment (dev, staging, prod…). The most common are:
#looks in public/stylesheets and assumes it's a css file
stylesheet_link_tag "filename_without_extension"
#looks in public/javascripts and assumes it's a js file
javascript_include_tag "jquery"
Of course, each of these sections could be expounded upon in much greater detail and this is just brushing the surface. Check out the following for more detail:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html
What you suggested works OK. As long as print_top_html and print_bottom_html stay in sync (and you can use automated tests to check this), then you never need to worry about them again, leaving you to focus on the real content of the site -- the stuff in the middle.
Alternatively, you can combine print_top_html and print_bottom_html into a single call, and send it HTML code (or a callback) to place in the middle.
I use the partials system of Zend_View (very similar to Rails). A partial is essentially a small HTML template that has its own variable scope. It can be called from inside views like:
<?php echo $this->partial('my_partial.phtml', array( 'var1' => $myvar ));
The variables that get passed into the construct get bound to local variables inside the partial itself. Very handy for re-use.
You can also render a partial from inside normal code, if you're writing a helper object where you have more complex logic than you'd normally feel comfortable putting in a view.
public function helperFunction()
{
// complex logic here
$html = $this->getView()->partial('my_partial.phtml', array('var1' => $myvar ));
return $html;
}
Then in your view
<?php echo $this->myHelper()->helperFunction(); ?>