Seperating code from content?

Many people have talked about seperating style from content (2, 3, 4), but for those of us who also code, what about seperating code from content? At present I’m in the process of coding a backend for a new site, but because I’m only at the intermediate stage of my PHP learning curve I’m still finding it difficult to learn how to best implement this.

Should I employ some sort of templating engine or maybe get creative with php classes?

If you know of any blog entries or articles or if you have any advice, please do post a comment. Thanks

Automated Style Switcher

With the Christmas period upon us, I got to thinking… wouldn’t it be cool to be able to change the style of your site automatically depending on the time of the year?

Well with PHP it’s easy!

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$today = date(′d/m′);
echo "<style type="text/css">";
echo "/*<![CDATA[*/";
if  ($today ==25/12)  {
echo "@import url(css/xmas_style.css);";
}  elseif ($today ==01/01)  {
echo "@import url(css/newyears_style.css);";
} else {
echo "@import url(css/style.css);";
}
echo "/*]]>*/";
echo "</style>";

First you assign a value to the $today variable using the date() function.

Then you echo out the beginning of the style tag. Then using a simple if…elseif…else statement you check if the value of the $today variable is equal to a certain date. If so, import the appropriate stylesheet. Finally you need to echo out the end of the style tag.

The code above needs to be placed inside the <head></head> tags in order to work. Also, this will only work properly on sites that have separated presentation from content.

Of course the code above only works on a day-to-day basis. If, for example, you wanted to have an xmas stylesheet be used for the entire month of December you would need to edit the code to check if the day falls between 01/12 – 31/12, but I’ll leave that up to you to figure out

The Joys of AMP on WinXP SP2

So what’s AMP?

Apache, MySQL & PHP.

Why so joyous? Because it’s soooooo easy to upgrade them that even a kid could do it!
I’ll leave the decision of whether or not their is a hint of sarcasm in that statement up to you

Honestly…. I don’t care what anyone says… it’s not all gravy. I spent the best part of ten hours upgrading today. I won’t go into the details because you probably won’t bother reading it anyway. But, if you are a web developer and are having problems installing Apache, MySQL & PHP on Windows XP SP2 feel free to give me a shout. I’ll try my best to help you out.

At least now I can get back to coding

Oh by the way, the versions I upgraded to are Apache 2.0.52, MySQL 4.0.22 and PHP5.0.2