Create a maintainable webpage with php!
- the concept of separation of concern, modularization of content parts and use of templates to enhance ease of maintainability.

Written by Jon Berg <jon.berg|a|turtlemeat.com>

Introduction
A webpage normally consists of a menu that you can use to navigate the site, some text and pictures, maybe some advertising and maybe a footer. Normally when most people create webpages, they create the complete page as one document. The menu, text, the logo, footer and everything inside one html document. This is a good way to do it for a few pages, but it is not optimal if you expect to update it frequently and add new things or make changes.

Modularization of content parts
This means that you split up your document, example the menu is one component, the advertising is another component. With a component it is essentially a html-file. You place the html that makes up the menu in one file, the html that displays the advertising in another file and so on.

You will then create a template html-file that you will use as a base for every page of content. In this template file you will use import statement that will pull the content of your logo-component, your menu-component, your advertising component, your footer text into it and other components you may have.

This is makes the whole process of maintaining a website a lot easier. You will only have to change the one file example the menu-file, and the menu will change on all your webpages. Instead of going through all pages and updating the menu.

In practice, not difficult
PHP is a fully fledged programming language, so you may first be turned off by having to use it if you are not a programmer. To do the things above you only have to write <? php include"yourfilename.html"; ?> on the place where you want to import a component (textfile) into your document. So you have a a normal html-document and you name it myfile.php instead of myfile.html and you insert <? php include"yourfilename.html"; ?> . The content of "yourfilename.html" will be printed on the place where you write <? php include"yourfilename.html"; ?>, the statement will not be shown. That's all the "programming" you have to do.

This technique is also supported by most server side programming languages like ASP or SSI.
The ASP code to do the same is: <!--#include file="includefile.asp"--> .
The SSI code to do it is: <!--#include virtual="/footer.html" --> .

I have seen the light with PHP so I do promote PHP. It is free, it runs on Linux and Apache.

Example
This page you are reading now is in fact made with this technique. Another page. And most webpages I make I do it this way. It is a very good way of making websites (banging myself on the chest).

My template for this page looks like this:
<?php include 'head.php'; ?>
<title> write title here </title>
--write text content here--
<?php include 'foot.php'; ?>

The interesting thing with foot.php is that it includes another file categories.php that display all the links. So you can include things in the included files. The head.php contains the logo and text colors, though I should use CSS to control colors.

When I have copied my template, I write the content into the file. Then I add a link to the new page in categories.php. Then I upload the two files. EASY! Then the new file is linked from all the other old documents.

What I would have had to do if I had everything the menu, the logo etc. in one file, I would have had to go through them all and update the new link. Boring and time consuming.

A good way of starting is to actually design the page as one document, and then cut out the parts and put them in components / files. Most html editors support editing parts of html. You can then edit only the part.

Benefits
When doing it like explained in this document, you speed up the time to add or change things. If I want a new logo on this page, I edit my logo.php in my html-editor and upload it. And BANG! all pages have a new logo.

Benefits of using a template is that you can get new pages up quickly. Your pages will also automatically look the same. When editing many files individually errors can happen that will make things different, example on extra line here and some text gets a different position.

When your website becomes big and consists of many html documents it gets very hard to manually update all of them. Modularization will help you!

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