Website Structure

Question

I\'m pretty new to php and i\'m trying to decide the best way to organize the pages and, using PHP, deliver them. The two (basic) ideas I\'ve had are:

• A bunch o

Answer 1

Having used with both techniques in the past, I've found the former is more flexible, but that it can encourage poor practices. The latter provides a much more consistent user experience, as it keeps all your site-wide logic in one place and discourages you from making one-off exceptions.

I'm actually in the process of converting a site I wrote a couple of years ago from the included header/footer/menu model to the master-page model. The original system of includes was clean and straightforward and works very well. However, the more additional content I created, the more I realized the project was beginning to violate the DRY principle. Every page on the site began and ended the same way (repetition should always send up warning signals) and I was being tempted to make exceptions to the standard layout by omitting individual includes and writing one-off replacements. (Thankfully, I haven't yielded to that temptation often!)

Refactoring the site is making the pages more consistent, the layout easier to update (you can see the entire thing "at a glance"), and new pages easier to create.