[Simplog-devel] modular approach to customizing appearance and behavior

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To make customizing the appearance and behavior of different blogs  
easier (at least for me), I broke up the index.php and header.php files  
so that they would call different layout options that I'm keeping in a  
subdirectory called layout.

The new index.php is just:
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
<?php
if(!file_exists("config.php")) {
	header("Location: install.php");
	exit(0);
}

session_start();
require_once("lib.php");
require_once("class.BlogInfo.php");
require_once("class.BlogEntry.php");

$blogid = $_GET['blogid'];

if(!isset($blogid)) {
	$blogid = 1; #set default blog to see
	}
$blogInfo = new BlogInfo($blogid);
include("header.php");

$testindexfile = "layout/index".$blogid.".php";
if (file_exists($testindexfile)){
	$indexfile = $testindexfile;
}else{
	$indexfile = "layout/index0.php";
}
include($indexfile);	
?>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
The new header.php file is reduced to:

<?php
header("X-Pingback: $baseurl/api.php\n");

if(!isset($blogInfo)) {
	$btitle = "Simplog";
} else {
	$btitle = $blogInfo->getBlogTitle();
	$btag = $blogInfo->getBlogTagline();
}

if(isLoggedIn()) {
	$uid = getUID($_SESSION['login']);
}

$testheaderfile = "layout/header".$blogid.".php";
if (file_exists($testheaderfile)){
	$headerfile = $testheaderfile;
}else{
     	$headerfile = "layout/header0.php";
}

include($headerfile);

if(isLoggedIn()) {
	show_menu();
}
?>
<br>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
inside the layout subdirectory I have a series of files named header0,  
header1, header11 etc, and index0, index1.... plus the css files.  Only  
header0 and index0 are necessary
layout/header0.php is the missing pieces of the original header.php:
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title><?=$btitle?>: <?=$btag?></title>

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"  
src="<?=$baseurl?>/simplog.js"></script>

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS"  
href="<?=$baseurl?>/rss2.php" />
<link rel="pingback" href="<?=$baseurl?>/api.php" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?=$baseurl?>/layout/simplog.css"  
type="text/css" />
</head>
<body bgcolor=#ffffff marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 leftmargin=0  
topmargin=0>
<table width=100% border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=5 class=header>
<tr>
<td align=left><span class=blogname><?=$btitle?></span><br><span  
class=blogtag><?=$btag?></span></td>
</tr>
</table>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
The alternate headers are customized to modify appearance (I specify  
which css to use in each one, so some blogs can share css files), plus  
to make a blog require user login (which I want for all the blogs I'm  
using to control other websites), I add

<?php
	if(!isLoggedIn()) {
		auth();
	}
?>
to the header.  This also makes the headers look different for all the  
views of the blog - archives, search results, edit pages  etc.

  layout/index0.php is just the missing pieces of the original index.php:
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----

<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 width="100%"  
style="height:90%;">
	<tr valign="top">
		<td style="border-right:1px solid #999999;padding-right:24px;">
<div style="padding:10px;">

<?php @include("$baseurl/blog.php?blogid=$blogid"); ?>

</div>
		</td>
		<td align="center" width=150 style="padding-left: 24px;">

<?php include("blocks.php"); ?>

		</td>
	</tr>
</table>

</body>
</html>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
Obviously, this allows me to alter the appearance of the individual  
blog pages, put blocks on the left, add other stuff etc.

To a naive user, one could just install and use the defaults.  Changing  
the appearance of different blogs and staying within that look and feel  
is easier for the slightly more sophisticated user with this approach  
than by feeding blog content to another page, as internal navigation   
links don't have to be adjusted at all.  Would this be worth including  
in the next version?

Jim