I deal with a website that is composed of a lot of static content. One of the things that bothers me about the site is the amount of duplicate/one-off markup and that every time I have to change or update the UI, I have to modify a lot of different files and then make sure I didn't break anything. I was considering moving the website content to a PHP server and reorganizing the site contents to make my job easier.
/* This is also something of an exercise for me. I wanted to get my feet wet with PHP. Because of this, I chose not to go with an off the shelf framework. */
Is the following pattern sane to use for a static website? That is, assuming I want a simple framework for managing my website and I want to decouple my website UI from my content, is this a reasonable way to get it done? Have I overlooked anything?
Assume that I want to declare my content for each page on the website like this:
/* begin contentStub.php */
<?php $headerUtil->setTitle("Hola Mundo!"); ?>
<p>Hello world</p>
/* end contentStub.php */
Also assume that I want to use a simple template for my site like this:
/* begin UITemplate.php */
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title><?php echo($headerUtil->getTitle()); ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo($content); ?>
</body>
</html>
/* end UITemplate.php */
Now assume I set the PHP directive for auto_prepend_file to use the following file:
/* begin file: prepend.php */
<?php
class HeaderUtil
{
private $title;
public function __construct()
{
$this->title = "new page";
}
public function getTitle(){return $this->title;}
public function setTitle($title){$this->title = $title;}
//TODO: Add methods/collections to deal with css/js/keywords
}
$headerUtil = new HeaderUtil();
ob_start();
include($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']);
$content = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
include("UITemplate.php");
die();
?>
/* end file: prepend.php */
This example seems to run as I expect it to. Is this a reasonable way to decouple my website UI from my content using PHP? Much more specifically, assuming my requirements are unchanging, do I face any obvious and/or significant security, stability, or resource exhaustion risks using my approach?
Motivation for asking: I have a bit of experience with Coldfusion and have previously worked with Java ServerFaces 2. For those technologies, threading/scope was important and, in any language, file access time is critical. Am I missing anything here?
