Site Organization

[genericnumber1]

A website where individual pages are classes implementing a controller interface. index.php creates the instance of the page controller class depending upon a get variable and calls a common method defined by the controller interface.

vs

Doing the pages the classic way with the logic embedded on them individually.

Any opinions? I can never decide between these, the first has some advantages over the second but can be pretty overkill at times, am I thinking too Java?

[bqallover]

I generally use the second form, and have header.php, footer.php and maybe other "output includes" if the project requires them.

There's no [i]real[/i] problem with first form, though as you say it can be a little overkill sometimes.  Unless you're using a database to store the content (and hence bordering on the CMS/blog scale of things), you'll probably have separate files anyway for each page so there's no [i]real[/i] advantage to my mind.

In practice, I've done a number of sites where I use [url=http://www.pivotlog.net]Pivot[/url] as either a blog or news engine (i.e. the second form) and embed that on one page of a more traditional site (i.e. the first form).  So as in most things, combining the two is often a good approach. ;)

[redbullmarky]

i actually use the first method, based on trials with frameworks such as Cake and CodeIgniter. Once you get used to it, you'll find things much easier to maintain and use in the future than doing things the classic way.

[genericnumber1]

Yeah, I'll probably stick with the MVC pattern for large applications, but I'll probably just go with the classic way for the small apps or if performance is a real issue. Thanks for the info