Smarty or static php?

[mjp3000]

Ok guys... I'm at a bit of a crossroad here. I'm working on a pretty large scale website, but I didn't plan it like that - number of pages just kind of grew exponentially as I was going! Quality planning work, I must say...

Anyway, the site thus far is just static pages with some php. I reckon that the site will have about 300 pages in all by the time I'm done. So far, I've created about 100 pages.

I'm thinking a templating solution is needed, so i'm looking at implementing smarty.

My choice is - complete the other 200 pages as planned, or scrap it, roll back and rebuild with smarty. I am thinking I should scrap what I've done, and rebuild using smarty to allow for ease of expansion in the future.

What would you do? Am I mental? Am I a terrible planner, with diabolical project management skills? (don't answer that last one).

Just need some responses so I can have a sanity check before hitting edit>select all>delete!

[jezaff]

hey chap. well absolutely a large site needs seperation of content/style/design. It should be obvious to you why as someone managing 300 individual pages!!

Is it possible to phase in a template based setup? eg all new pages in the new way, convert others bit by bit?

I accept that page by page sites can work if you have a limited site but I think people who advocate such an approach for large sites must have some kind of vested interested lol. The benefits of a modular system are quickly apparent to anyone who has done both.

Im not aware of Smarty. But can imagine what it is. Any CMS sytems out there able to meet your needs (eg e107/joomla/etc)?

Personally Id say bite the bullet now - it will only get harder !

GL

[mjp3000]

Cheers. Smarty is the templating engine some CMS systems are built on. I think Wordpress uses phptemplate, which is a similar thing. It basically seperates out the presentation from the application.

When I first started this site, I was thinking 20 pages max. mySQL? Templates? Nah... won't need it! Couple of weeks later though, things had changed somewhat!

I don't really want to use a CMS, I prefer to do things from scratch, hence looking at smarty and mySQL-ing everything. I find with Wordpress and Drupal etc that I end up undoing everything to the point where I may as well have written a custom CMS to suit the site. Which is what I'm going to have to do now. Smarty is not really much harder than making your own Wordpress templates - it's basically the same thing.

Ah well, at least I've learnt a lesson - think about the site before you start coding it! Granted, i should have learned that the first day I started making sites, but 5 years late is better than never.

Right, best get phpmyadmin open... and where's that delete key?...

[Kyle]

Smarty is great - I highly recommend it!

As long as it doesnt take too long I would suggest you rewrite with smarty functionality. As you're only around 100 pages through the 300 you might find that redoing it all with smarty might actually save you some time overall.

[ChristopherB]

Yep i agree,

i work with smarty alot, it's great if used wisely but does take a while to get used to but it's good for enhancements / future developments.

[mjp3000]

Got started on this last night, chucking everything into mySQL and whatnot. Looking at it now, with a bit of mod_rewrite it'll end up being much more SEO friendly too. Not entirely sure why I ever decided to go with static... I think I need to sleep more!

Going off at a bit of a tangent, has anyone out there used cakephp, symfony? I've never used a PHP framework, and while I was thinking about optimising build time, I thought it might be an idea to look into these MVC frameworks if it speeds things up somewhat.

I tried ruby on rails (yes, I do love fads!), but I haven't even mastered PHP yet so knocked the idea of a new language on the head pretty sharpish.

Anyone had any previous joy with PHP frameworks?