OK, although you may not notice it, this site is a combination of dynamicly generated content and some static things that were generated before you entered. All this will be more clear when you read on.

This information is only useful for those creating a site like this on their own, or those who want to co-operate with Linux.be, I hope you're the latter one ;-)

A short description of PHP

You must have heard of PHP before. If not, check out http://www.php.net/. We use PHP because it's darn handy ;) One person is responsible for the layout, wrote some utilities for the site, defined some guidelines. And it is used all over the site.

If you look at the source of this page for instance, you'll notice some weird things. I used indentation a lot, but some code isn't indented. Well, that code was generated before it was send to you. and the _only_ part that differs really from any opther page on this site, is what's between the <!-- begin body --> and <!-- end body -->. All the rest is predefined for the whole site. Change one thing, and you changed the whole site. pretty powerfull, huh? ;)

What are the main advantages then?

Ok, if that wasn't already clear. Think about it:

• The person responsible for the content doesn't need to think about the layout. Just the content
• Changing something about the layout, or even designing a whole new layout is a piece of cake.
• I don't have to worry if something is wrong. I can prevent things from going wrong in the first place. checking for files before giving someone access to it, checking for buttons and if they don't exist, generate them before linking to them...
• It makes me sleep better at night ;-)

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