[thelist] Web Development -- Presentation vs. Content

[SBeam]

On Wednesday 08 October 2003 09:55 pm, bruce wrote:
> separate the Presentation/Layout from the Content. IE. if I create a site
> that has a lot of JScript/PHP/MySql as well as content. What have you used
> to create the app, such that a person can later go in and change the
> content without impacting the presentation layer....

have you looked at Smarty?

http://smarty.php.net/

Some people don't see the point as it adds an 'extra' layer of programming 
language to learn - but smart smarty users don't do anything complicated in 
the template, the heavy lifting is in the calling scripts and classes. You 
can teach your average HTML/CSS design person what the smarty tags mean in 
about 2 minutes, and they are on their way happily hacking in your templates/ 
directory while you concentrate on the application code. My PHP scripts have 
zero (0) lines of HTML in them now - sort of ironic, for PHP - but it is nice 
knowing that when you need to change the width of a table cell it won't be 
buried in the middle of a for{} loop inside a function inside a class inside 
some include()ed file... and better yet, someone else is worrying about it 
anyway.