Re: CSS + xhtml static site - going dynamic?
- From: "Roger Moss" <roger.moss(BINTHISBIT)@tiscali.fr>
- Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:58:48 +0100
"Saul" <saul.dobney@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:76fdf1e8-9d8d-48f7-8959-8257948e1055@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 8 Feb, 11:48, "Roger Moss" <roger.moss(BINTHISBIT)@tiscali.fr>
wrote:
Having got a site up and running against a deadline, using the tried and
tested CSS + xhtml static route, we're now growing fast and, as we always
knew, about to outgrow this approach quite soon. We plan to go with
PHP/MySQL. So far, so good. Our hosting provider already has the apps in
place.
My question, then, is this: Since we're very much a content-driven site -
specifically an online magazine - can anyone suggest some relevant reading
to help us make the transition, please? Here's our URL:www.mountainpassions.com
We have a PHP/MySQL/Apache package set up and running locally, along with a
basic grounding book, but what we haven't come across so far is anything
which deals with what for us are the key issues of setting up a
data-driven/dynamic environment for editorial pages. I guess we're
'untypical'.
Hi Roger,
Very nice site - really like the photographs from one of my favourite
areas of France. The answer to your last point about being 'untypical'
actually isn't true. More and more sites are content managed even for
relatively simple page-driven sites. Essentially it gives the site
owner the opportunity to edit and add to their site without having to
keep going back to a web-designer - even small businesses need to keep
their websites up-to-date and 'fresh', or to tweak them to improve
search engine rankings.
I know that you're looking to do this yourself, but as an experiment
to see what would be needed I copied your site content over to our CMS
system (which uses PHP/MySQL) to see if there was anything special
that would be difficult to replicate and the answer was in pretty much
no (it only took about an hour to transfer excluding fancy twiddles
and the page skin). There's nothing particular special and lots of
different CMS systems would be able to build your site, but going to a
full CMS would depend on what compromises you are prepared to make
with regards to fitting in with someone else's user-interface, CMS
page structure and display constraints. However, you would get
something much more powerful than if you build by hand.
To do this yourself, start with the HTML page structure, thinking as
if the page is made up of a series of areas, then to fill elements of
the structure with the content. So the base page might be structured
into header, middle, footer, then in the middle area you would have
left-column, mainarea, right-column. You build each area as if it is a
series of DIV layers so you can target them with CSS and place the
content appropriately.
PHP then fills each content area. This can be simple - for instance
using PHP 'include' command to include individual files for each area.
However, for this conent still has to be created by hand in separate
files and does need some management as to what file is included with
what page (your sidebars in the main area change regularly with the
main content, so this would be hard work to keep organised, but would
allow fixed elements to remain fixed across all pages with a single
header include for instance).
A better alternative is to have PHP pull the content off a database.
There would be a simple HTML form with a textarea for each area that
content can go in on the page, this is then passed back to PHP which
then saves it to the database. Content can be pulled off as say
"select right_column from pages where page=12 or
page_name='seasons.html'" in MySQL and put in the correct place on the
page using a PHP display_page script. You have to write the PHP editor
code to present the author with a form for a page, showing any
existing data so it can be edited and which then writes the new/
changed form back to the database, and the second page displayer in
PHP.
So far this is simple and easy, the downside of this is link
management - menus and page linking need to be done by hand. Most
people flounder at this point because sites quickly run into link
spaghetti - that is as the site grows, creating, maintaining and
editing links by hand for pages starts to become harder, particularly
adding links to new pages into old content. There are two parts to an
initial solution to this. Firstly is to separate page specific content
from global site content. So one editable form for site structure
which controls site-wide page structure and menus at a global level,
then a separate page editor which deals with the page-specific
content. When displaying the page you bring the two together - for
instance header from the site structure table, content from the page
content table.
However, there will still be link spaghetti because the menu links for
each particular page content needs to be different too - not just
global 'section' menus.
So the second part is to formally build the linking structure into the
database (a linking table) so the database itself knows which page is
linked with which (eg which page is a child or parent of what). This
then allows dynamic menuing which can be created on the fly so the
menu for each page changes appropriately. You just have to pull the
list of child or linked pages from the database and place them as a
list on the page into an appropriate content place. When you add a new
page, you just need to link it appropriate in the linking table and
menus will adapt automatically.
In broad terms you would be finished here for something simple - a
global page structure table, a content table for each page's specific
content and a linking table between pages in MySQL with an PHP editor/
creator form for each of these three and a PHP display page script
bringing the elements together to make a page.
This is pretty rudimentary. You don't have much in the way of bells
and whistles to make site building that bit easier and more flexible -
no image uploading control for instance, dynamic database driven URL
rewriting, wysiwyg editors etc and you will find maddening constraints
that you'd want more control over. For instance it's quite possible
you'll need multiple menuing structures built dynamically, or would
like the summary of article features pulled through automatically. You
would have to take decisions as to where to draw the line between the
flexibility and development.
In addition, looking at your current site I wasn't sure if it was
designed to be that expandable. Even with simple content managed
systems, the number of pages in the site increases rapidly. For
instance our users typically start thinking they can manage with 10-12
pages then quickly find adding stuff so easy that they quickly run up
to 100+ pages. So what happens when you have 30 or 40 articles on
properties, or need an extra section on food because this then has
enough content for a section all of it's own? How will the user
navigate the site structure or menus with these extra pages? As an on-
line magazine are you expecting to be in editions (Q1 2008,Q2 2008,Q3
2008 etc), or just regularly adding articles which then appear on the
front page - or do you use a combination so it can be seen by edition
and by section? Some of these structural aspects can be built into the
database design if you start to think about them now.
Saul
www.notanant.com
communities of websites
websites for communities
Now that's what I call a considered response - just what I need to get a clearer picture of where we need to think about going from here.
And an object lesson in the value of newsgroups...
Thanks for your efforts, and your kind comments on our work; you can see why it's a labour of love!
RM
.
- References:
- CSS + xhtml static site - going dynamic?
- From: Roger Moss
- Re: CSS + xhtml static site - going dynamic?
- From: Saul
- CSS + xhtml static site - going dynamic?
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