CSS and PHP

lenora

I am in the process of designing a new site which I plan to code in PHP with a mySQL database attached. I have been trying to think about what I want it to look like and I know I will be using a style sheet for it but I wondered if it is possibe to use the style sheet to format the results of queries that I make to my database

thanks

wolfman

Yeah you can. You should try to use CSS as much as possible. It separates much of the UI (or look and feel) from the codebase.

You'll need to do some reading (googling) into it, but you can style all of the output. You should be able to get to a point where by you can change the whole look, colour, position etc... of your site just by changing the style sheet. You can also then start to do slightly more funky stuff such as dynamic stylesheets, or giving the user the option to pick the "look" they like.

MercilessKiller

Using XML is a good bet for styling results from a database.

Do a search on XML and XSL Stylesheets

wolfman

You'd need to convert the query into Xml which is another step, and further complexity in itself.

Handy if you need to share the data between other applications though, very much a service orientated way of doing things. Worth reading about SOAP, something like:
http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/689

lenora

thanks a lot everyone I will look into it

lotto-dreamer

You can have a look at this very helpful site

http://www.tizag.com/xmlTutorial/

MercilessKiller

Yup I can recommend that site too! Helped me through my PHP/CSS/XML module at uni