on 25/06/02 6:40 PM, Jean-Christian Imbeault ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Some of the "issues" are things like how to make it painless for both > the designers and me if one day, out of the blue, a designers decides > that the background colour should be changed, or the graphics changed. > Or even worse the two column layout should be a three column layout.
well, some things are easy (see my other posts about colours) and some things are hard (2 col layout changing to 3), although not impossible. decide on a allowed set of changes the design team can make/have access to, and stick to it... anything else will require more code, and more time. > But to start off with simple things like: > > Designer: > - on this page a dynamic table will be generated according to the search > criteria entered by the user > - lines will have alternating colours > > I can code this easily, but what if the designer then decides that he > wants each *third* line to alternate colour, or he wants to use three > colours instead of two (a pattern 1,2,3,1,2,3 instead of 1,2,1,2). > > How can I make it so that he can do these changes without coming to see > me to change the code that outputs the data used in the table? Well, then you work on a set of code that allows for configuration of the table to alternate in 2 or 3 colours (1st rule established -- not < 2, not > 3), and then allow them to set the 2 or 3 values via a colour configuration file (see other posts) which is included at the top of the page. Proving them ACCESS to these configuration values can be as simple as allowing them to write/change the config.php file, or it might involve a content management system with a GUI web based control panel. Generally the config aren't hard, it's executing them in a function wrapper / code block. Establish rules, design config variables to accomodate the options, allow access to these config variables (a flat file, mysql values, whatever), then accomodate these config options in code. Yes, providing code that allows for 2 OR 3 alternating color rows in a table will be a lot more than for just 2, so you need to establish if this is a priority. Justin French -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
