RE: [Phpwebsite-developers] Template system (Smarty)

[Alain F. <al...@va...>]

Hello,

I wonder why all the talking about "storing templates in the database" comes
from; I surely hope it isn't because I somehow mentioned the idea in one of
my previous posts.. :)

As a matter of fact, it would be pretty stupid to store the whole template
in the database. Why? Because that's not what databases are for. Let me
explain: how many times will phpWebSite need to run "typical database
functions" on the templates themselves, like: finding a text in the
template, creating the "sum of all templates", finding a "template's
detail", and so on ? Never, right.

It's exactly the same story as with images. Although you can store the whole
binary stream of an image into mySQL, there's very little or absolutely no
sense in doing so.

Storing the template's filename is indeed what is needed. Anyway, as Todd
says, you will get far better performance by using the filesystem for this.
And it's not only about performance, it's also easier to manage the
templates when they are simple text files.

Using a browser-based interface to change the styles is indeed a cool idea.
Oh wait, wasn't it me who initially suggested that ?  hehe :)). Seriously,
it wouldn't be too hard to integrate it. A little brainstorming if you
permit:

1. Ideally, all styles would need to be stored in one single .css file. That
makes management and automation easier. Let's call it theme.css. The real
filename would actually be theme.css.php because the styles would be defined
dynamically through PHP and database calls.
2. Every style (ID, tag overload, or class) that is used in phpWebSite would
need to be defined in that file.
3. The admin interface should have a "preview style" feature so that one can
check the result immediately.
4. One should be able to define more than one theme. This means that we'd
need a "themes" table, and a "themesdetail" table that defines the values
for the individual styles, per theme.
5. It would be nice if the advanced user would not be limited to using the
admin interface. The advanced user should be able to manually apply his
hand-crafted .css file.
6. How do we go about defining a style's values? The problem is that you can
have a varying number of style attributes. A ".bigTitle" CSS class can have
a single "font-size" attribute, or it can have a dozen attributes:
font-family, font-size, color, margin-left, and so on. There are a couple of
possibilities. The first one is the easy one. For every style used, -we-
define the attributes that can be edited through the admin interface. For
instance, we define that for the .bigTitle class, only font-color and
font-family can be set using the tool. The second possibility would be to
create a complete CSS editor, allowing the site administrator to dynamically
add, edit and remove style attributes. Then again, either we assume that the
site admin has good CSS knowledge and knows what he is doing, OR we create a
"user assisting" interface that shows the site administrator what attributes
are available for this or that class, and what values this or that attribute
can have. You see, this completely dynamic version would certainly require
a -lot- of work and come pretty close to a full-featured CSS editor, because
we'd somehow need to classify the various styles so that the 'system' knows
what atributes and values are available.
7. If we are going to make it as dynamic: how about performance? We'd need
to investigate caching/compiling options.
8. Also, having that degree of "dynamicity" (?) would allow us to make a
very customizable phpWebSite in which the site visitor could create his own
style sheet definitions !
9. For every style definition, the editor should show where a particular
style is used, so that the user immediately sees at what places his changes
are going to have an effect. It's a PITA to edit a style for one place just
to find out that the very same style is used on 5 other pages, and messes
everything up on those.

Okay, enough for now. Waiting for comments/suggestions/ideas :)

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : php...@li...
> [mailto:php...@li...]De la part de
> Todd Owen
> Envoyé : jeudi 29 mars 2001 16:31
> À : php...@li...
> Objet : Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Template system (Smarty)
>
>
> Karsten, that was exactly what I was talking about !  I agree that the
> templates and style sheets (generically called themes) should be stored in
> the filesystem and not in the database for performance issues.  An browser
> based form to edit the style sheets also makes sense and avoid uploading.
>
> --Todd
>
>
>
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