Open Source Web Design

I am keen on open source, free (quality) stuff, and using, modifying, and customizing found code (why reinvent the wheel?). I ran across Open Source Web Design (OWSD), "a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!" I thought I'd devote an entry to this worthy site.

They go on to say in their About Us page: "The Open Source Web Design project was founded in September 2000 by Frank Skettino (bkenoah) as a way for the average Joe-Hacker to have a quality, organized web design template ready for him when he's ready to share his ideas on the World Wide Web. We understood that many hackers would like to have a place to share their ideas on the Web, but are too busy to create a decent layout. This results in a poorly organized page or none at all. With OSWD, we hope to solve this problem."

You can browse thumbnails of the member-contributed design templates (92 pages of them!), check out the most popular designs, and even rate them. I have browsed 60 pages of thumbnails so far, and I think it's safe to say there is something for pretty much any taste. If you have content needing a container, you may need to look no further than OWSD.

PHP 1 2 3- File Components (Templates)

As promised- a simple tutorial on templating (you may first want to read the previous introductory entry). Let me first define a little terminology. A template, as the word is used here, is a part of a document that you can use in more than one page. These document sections are placed in separate files and are then used to 'build' your page by being 'included' into their respective positions on the page. We will use the PHP function include() which, as its name implies, includes local php files. We also have the option of using the readfile() function if there is only HTML markup (no PHP code) in the files to be included.

<?php and ?> are the standard start and end PHP tags. The PHP engine will process any file with a .php extension, executing the code contained by the tags. Without these tags, the code would be mistaken for HTML and output to the browser as is.

Okay, let's begin... Read the full article