Date: 12/27/05 (WebDesign)    Keywords: php, css, web

Because work was a bit slow due to the holidays and all (just got out of college and working as an assistant art director in a startup magazine) I'm trying to convert the magazine's website to w3c standards (as of right now the page has quite a few frames and i know that's a near arrestable offense) as well as cutting back on all the tables and so on used. Since everyone here at work isn't overly net/code savvy (including myself, but i'm good at picking up on the stuff), I've been trying to figure out the best way to accomplish what I want*, and it seems that along with the CSS I've been teaching myself I need to get a fair enough understanding of PHP as well. Are there any sites available that give good tutorials on how to create a general template using PHP?

(*So what do I want to do? The website itself is pretty minimalist. The magazine title and a menubar are going to be at the top, the main content (an article, info about the magazine, contact information, whatever page they're currently on) will be under that, and to the right of the main content some banner adspace is going to be available. I pretty much want to make it so that if more menu items are added and if the banners change, I only have to tweak one file instead of going and changing each and every file. My original plan was to make one file with an iframe set up for the main content, but after some stern educating I learned that's just as troublesome as using frames as a whole.)

One of the php tutorials I read so far claimed that using include tags that contained things like the menu and banner ads was the best way to go (so each page just had includes tag that referenced a .inc file which could change whenever you wanted) (link), while another wrote about what i see on a good number of sites where your page is set up as "whatever.php?id=007", so the content is flowing onto the template (link). From what I'm understanding, it seems they're both wanting me to have the opposite stuff used as the content to flow in. The first wants me to flow in the stuff that generally stays constant (menu/adspace), while the second wants me to flow in the stuff that isn't constant (articles, contact information, and all the stuff that goes on seperate pages). Which is the best one possible? All that stuff is W3C safe too, right?

Thanks in advance!

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/webdesign/1033749.html