Faithful
07 Jan 2010, 10:02 AM
Sorry about having to ask something kind of general like this. A friend and I have a site for friends and others with a general common interest in political matters. The site has been around for a number of years mostly on one forum or another. In the last year and a half, we migrated it over to its own shared hosting place offering PHP/Ruby/MySQL and the like.
We wanted to start building out the site more so that it wasn't almost entirely the forum... there's a number of areas that we'd like to make it more web 2.0 with interactive ajax and a nicer snap in type layout to provide opportunities for users to more seamlessly share and interact(rather than the traditional forum approach).
I have a dev background but it certainly isn't in web at all. The last 3 or so weeks I've gotten informed about PHP, HTML, CSS and JS well enough to do some one off MVC type applications that are of use for our site but there are a few issues with this.
As stated before, the site design should be much more seamless. As it is, the individual views sort of exist in their own HTML page context and are not seamlessly integrated into the whole page. From what I can see, that will require a more disciplined approach to templating from the controller to view level, while also bringing more order into the javascript due to namespace issues.
So my questions/concerns/pleas for help or guidance are as follows:-
Any suggestions on bringing more order to the templating of the front end? And how to order the JS? Any guides/tutorials/books? Any advice from your own past mistakes?
As it is right now, for instance, the controller is sorting out ajax from regular HTML loads in one controller for each view-controller mapping... I'm thinking this is going to become a pain in the butt as it seems to push more presentational issues into the controller... is this generally so? Is there any good reason to keep that structure?
Thanks if you've read this far.
We wanted to start building out the site more so that it wasn't almost entirely the forum... there's a number of areas that we'd like to make it more web 2.0 with interactive ajax and a nicer snap in type layout to provide opportunities for users to more seamlessly share and interact(rather than the traditional forum approach).
I have a dev background but it certainly isn't in web at all. The last 3 or so weeks I've gotten informed about PHP, HTML, CSS and JS well enough to do some one off MVC type applications that are of use for our site but there are a few issues with this.
As stated before, the site design should be much more seamless. As it is, the individual views sort of exist in their own HTML page context and are not seamlessly integrated into the whole page. From what I can see, that will require a more disciplined approach to templating from the controller to view level, while also bringing more order into the javascript due to namespace issues.
So my questions/concerns/pleas for help or guidance are as follows:-
Any suggestions on bringing more order to the templating of the front end? And how to order the JS? Any guides/tutorials/books? Any advice from your own past mistakes?
As it is right now, for instance, the controller is sorting out ajax from regular HTML loads in one controller for each view-controller mapping... I'm thinking this is going to become a pain in the butt as it seems to push more presentational issues into the controller... is this generally so? Is there any good reason to keep that structure?
Thanks if you've read this far.