Chapter 21. DESIGN
Writing Requirements Specifications........................................................
Writing Design Documents...........................................................................
Using CVS............................................................................................................
Modularization Using include
FreeEnergy
FastTemplate
Midgard
Ariadne
Preserving State and Providing Security
Cloaking
URLs Friendly to Search Engines
Running a Script Regularly
Building a Web site with PHP is not the same as building a static Web site. If you choose
simply to sprinkle PHP code occasionally throughout the site, the effect may be minimal,
of course. If you choose to use PHP to generate every page, you will find many
opportunities for transforming patterns into functions. As I wrote in Chapter 20,
"Integration with HTML," elements such as opening and closing body tags can be
put into a function or an included file. The consequence of this situation is that you no
longer have a Web site. You have a Web application.
When this happens, it becomes more important to draw upon formal development
techniques. Certainly, structured design is useful when building static Web sites. The
case is made plainly in Web Site Engineering by Thomas Powell. The addition of PHP
makes careful design critical. I can't cover every topic of software engineering as it
applies to Web applications in the context of a chapter. I recommend reading Powell's
book as an excellent starting point.
After introducing the basics of software requirements and design, I will explore some
specific design issues and solutions.