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plenty of people hand-code stuff. you do exactly what you want and not something else. the real advancement in coding sites is in reusable code. i believe movable type does it. i'm not entirely sure about the various coding frameworks. i wrote my own about three years ago and it has combined with a couple of different templating engines and databases in the intervening years. in any case, if you can write a piece of html only once and use it over and over, modifying it becomes far easier because you only have to change and debug it once.
Precisely... I'm currently working on my own PHP Content Managment System as an alternative to things like PHP-Nuke. The advantage here is that, for every file I write (I write files for each function of the CMS that can be included anywhere), I can use it a bazillion times over.
For the interested, my CMS would be better for people who aren't total idiots, and want an easy to manage website that inhabits whatever layout you should choose to use (rather than something like Nuke which needs to be skinned).
For the interested, my CMS would be better for people who aren't total idiots, and want an easy to manage website that inhabits whatever layout you should choose to use (rather than something like Nuke which needs to be skinned).
skinning or templating makes life a lot easier, honestly. if you're really good, you can write it in such a way that the files common to most sites live under version control. that way if you ever find a bug in them (and you will), you can easily fix it everywhere with a one-liner. the idea is that you keep three things seperate from each other: code lives under version control (cvs) and each site checks out a copy that can be updated, data lives naturally in a database, and appearance lives in templates/skins that contain all the HTML. using this technique, it's possible to launch any number of sites built off the same premise, that may or may not use the same design. i learned it at a dot-com in san francisco where we hosted a few hundred sites built from a few basic designs, all of which shared little overlapping parts of a few hundred thousand pieces of data. think of how mindsay works. your blog lives in a database somewhere. their code lives in their code base, and they've even extended it so that templates/skins live in another database for the ultimate in reskinning any page at the touch of a button.
That's the basic idea behind the system. I have a central location for my code, and the content/data is all either DB or external (depending on what the situation is). The trick is, the entire design/appearence simply includes (and by includes I mean PHP include()s) a fetching script. That's why it isn't for total idiots- it takes a basic sense of what you're doing to complete. It simply adds a power to a basic website.
If I ever find myself with that kind of time, I could develop a basic-style version that lets you edit the style and layout of the pages and everything (skinning >_>
but that's my second priority.
If I ever find myself with that kind of time, I could develop a basic-style version that lets you edit the style and layout of the pages and everything (skinning >_>
but that's my second priority. you might take a google for something called TemplatePower. i wrote the original RW codebase in that, and my personal site (which is of the same vintage -- 2003ish) still runs it. when i recoded RW in late 2004, i did it with a more powerful and faster compiling template engine called smarty. smarty has a bit of a learning curve, but templatepower should take you no more than 15 minutes to figure out from scratch. editing templates can be done either by hand or in wysiwyg editors because they're really just modified html. beware of syntax errors in the templates. there are no error messages, just blankness.
also check out version control with a tool called CVS. it keeps track of changes you make, added/deleted files, and will let you roll back a change you didn't mean to make. again, there's a bit of a learning curve, as with most tools that were developed for unix, but the benefits abound. plus it's industry standard, so if you want to do this later...
Gar, Smarty. I'm well aware of that learning curve. I'll take a look-see at CVS, I've heard of it but never bothered.
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