I am programming my first real PHP website and am wondering how to make my code more readable to myself.
The reference book I am using is PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th ed.
The aforementioned book gives three approaches to separating logic and content:
include files
function or class API
template system
I haven't chosen any of these yet, as wrapping my brains around these concepts is taking some time. However, my code has become some hybrid of
the first two as I am just copy-pasting away here and modifying as I go.
On presentation side, all of my pages have these common elements: header, top navigation, sidebar navigation, content, right sidebar and footer.
The function-based examples in
the book suggest that I could have these display functions that handle all
the presentation example. So, my page code will be like this:
display_header();
display_navigation();
display_content();
display_footer();
However, I don't like this because
the examples in
the book have these print statements with HTML and PHP mixed up like this:
echo "<tr bgcolor=\"".$color."\"><td><a href=\"".$url."\">" ...
I would rather like to have HTML with some PHP in
the middle, not
the other way round.
I am thinking of making my pages so that at
the beginning of my page, I will fetch all
the data from database and put it in arrays. I will also get
the data for variables. If there are any errors in any of these processes, I will put them into error strings.
Then, at
the HTML code, I will loop through these arrays using foreach and display
the content. In some cases, there will be some variables that will be shown. If there is an error variable that is set, I will display that at
the proper position.
(As a side note:
The thing I do not understand is that in most example code, if some database query or whatnot gives an error, there is always:
else echo 'Error';
This baffles me, because when
the example code gives an error, it is sometimes echoed out even before
the HTML has started...)
For people who have used ASP.NET, I have gotten somewhat used to
the code-behind files and lblError and I am trying to do something similar here.
The thing I haven't figured out is how could I do this "do logic first, then presentation"
thing so that I would not have to replicate for example
the navigation logic and navigation presentation in all of
the pages.
Should I do some include files or could I use functions here but a little bit differently? Are there any good articles where these "styles" of separating presentation and logic are explained a little bit more thoroughly.
The book I have only has one paragraph about this stuff.
What I am thinking is that I am talking about some concepts or ways of doing PHP programming here, but I just don't know
the terms for them yet.
I know this isn't a straight forward question, I just need some help in organizing my thoughts.
