I think the issues are VERY project specific.  Luckily for me I'm the
DESIGNER and PROGRAMMER on many of my projects, but often I'm just one of
the two.

When I'm just designing, I obviously need to develop page templates, but
more and more of my time is spent developing style guides (often also called
VM's (visual manifestos), among others).

Basically, if a Style Guide is done right, programmers can make a whole heap
of design-related decisions as they go.  This can be in the form of colour
guides, type styles, heading treatment, image treatment, spacing, layout
styles, form presentation, etc etc.

If the programmer reads and understands the rules, then a LOT of back and
forth can be saved.


Commonly a site may have:

--------------------------
|     common header      |
--------------------------
|                        |
| dynamic middle section |
|                        |
|                        |
--------------------------
|     common footer      |
--------------------------


What you want to do is have the designer "design" the header and footer, and
provide style guides and samples of what might happen in the middle.


>From there, it depends on how far you want to separate the code and content.

Simple things like:

- defining $col1 $col2 $col3 colours which can be changed for a different
pallet at any time
- defining font tags like $fontBig $fontHeading $fontCopyright which can be
changed site-wide at any time

Slightly more complex things like a webbox/fusebox architecture
(http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/bill19990831.php3), or even just
separating the TEXT of the pages out into separate plain text files or into
a database will be a major help.

Also check out http://bombusbee.com & http://www.fusebox.org in relation to
fuseboxes.

Then talk about CSS -- the whole aim of CSS is to separate content from
design/mark-up.  There's a pretty good article on SitePoint
(http://www.WebmasterBase.com/article/379) which brushes the surface.


There's about another 5 or six articles on this page worth reading:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/

And I'd recommend spending a LOT of time at http://SitePoint.com
(http://www.WebmasterBase.com).




I think you need to define the "issues" you mention, and them we can all
help with some solutions :)



on 25/06/02 3:00 PM, Jean-Christian Imbeault ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
wrote:

> I'm just about to start a large PHP project in which I get to work with
> professional designers/layout people. I want to separate all the
> programming logic from the presentation but I am not sure how to do this.
> 
> Can anyone point me to resources (web tutorials/articles or books) that
> would help me figure out how best to separate my programming work from
> designer's work and how best to integrate them?
> 
> Sorry for asking such a generic question but I don't know how to best
> phrase it. I did look on the web but the best I could find were some
> mentions of templates. While templates seems ok they don't address all
> the issues of separation presentation from code (if I understand them
> correctly).
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Jc
> 


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