Posted by "Richard Lynch" on 01/20/06 00:55

On Thu, January 19, 2006 4:02 pm, Jedidiah wrote:
> I mentioned earlier that I recently switched my site over to PHP. I
> had a
> couple of reasons for this:
>
> 1: I was using Server Side Includes, and had been told that PHP
> includes
> were better and definitely more popular.
>
> 2: I began sending out a newsletter which was written by someone else
> in
> PHP.
>
> I am beginning to wonder if this was a good idea. I can no longer
> preview
> my pages without uploading the files to the server. This can really
> become
> a problem when I am making slight formatting changes to my CSS file
> where I
> need to refresh the page every few seconds until I get the look just
> right.
>
> Is it really worth changing all the files to PHP files and using
> includes?
> Is there any way around this, or am I stuck uploading??

Several options spring to mind.

#1.
Install Apache (free) and PHP (free) and MySQL (free) on your desktop
where you build your pages.

You'll have your own little Intranet with one (1) server (your
computer) and one client (your comupter) and one user (you).

You can then test to your heart's content all kinds of fun stuff in
your page and have no worry that anybody but you will be affected.

This is a pretty standard development model. Most PHP developers do
this because it's quite easy, and you can then work with any new
technology you want without worrying about it crashing the real
server.

If you have a laptop, you can also then work anywhere at all.

#2.
Consider using a template library such as Smarty so that your Template
files can be viewed/edited independently of the program logic, so that
CSS changes aren't affected as much by PHP, and you MIGHT be able to
skip #1... But you probably shouldn't.

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