Rethink

Well, yes, I started off thinking about using Smarty templates on the new site.

Then I thought again. First of all, I want to start getting this stuff off the ground and working. So why should I blow time and effort on starting from scratch with a new templating system? Surely it’s going to be better to start off with what I know, primarily as a proof-of-concept, and keeping in mind that yes, I will want to sort it all into templates later. And ideally with a minimum of code-cruft and work.

But for now, well hell, I might as well just do it in my normal way, which is fairly modular (i.e. templated) anyway, just without bundles of extra stuff. Then when it’s up and running I can run a development copy that uses the templates. When they’re all up, running, and tested, I can move them into the main site. Hey, that almost sounds like something sensible.

I must be doing something wrong…

Templating

Over the weekend, I’m going to be doing some more work on the new site. I’ve got most of it in my head now, so it’s “just” a matter of now getting it into code, and working.

As part of that process, I’ve decided to be “brave” and use a templating system for the first time on a home-grown site. I can see that it’ll have a lot of strengths in the long run, but my experiences with the templating “system” *cough* we use for work’s main site is such a sack of shit I’m still not certain about them. So it’s all part of my own learning curve, really, seeing if another method for doing them is going to be better.

I’m going to be going with one I got asked about for a job interview a while back, Smarty. The name doesn’t fill me with optimism, but hell, I’m willing to give it all a bash.

I’ll write more about them on Monday, I’m sure…

Hand Coding

There are times where I can just end up feeling like a complete numpty. This has been one of those days.

Because I’m also an epically sad git, when it comes to writing webpages and PHP (PHP in particular, in this case) I tend to write them by hand, rather than using programs like DreamWeaver or whatever to do the work for me. There’s a lot of reasons for this, primarily that if I write it I know what I’ve done, it’s fixed in my head, and I can go back later, look at it, and know what I’m doing. Dreamweaver in particular is not good for that kind of thing.

The down-side of hand-coding, though, is that on occasion you can make a right arse of things, and then it can take a while to figure it out. And that’s what’s happened today. I’ve been trying to figure out why something was displaying when it shouldn’t be. And could I? Could I eckerslike.

I’ve finally figured it out though, and it’s a simple mistake because of writing stuff by hand.

In PHP, setting a variable is done by using $variable=1;

If you then want to check the value of it, you need to use if ($variable==1) .

Yes, I was checking it with if ($variable=1), which in PHP is something that’s always true – because you’ve assigned it to be 1 in that self-same line. One character wrong, and now it’s all fixed and working perfectly. And it only took three hours to figure out…