Page 1 of 1

Thanks! Oh, and 'nuther question -Whats good wysiwyg editor?

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 2:05 pm
by Brik
First off, thanks! I have asked two questions this week and I have gotten exactly the answers I needed to move me forward in my project.
viewtopic.php?t=73438
and
viewtopic.php?t=73409

Essentially I am in a teach myself some things mode.

I started out with MS Access and then ported my data-model and data to MySQL. Installed Apache and PHP, got everything working fine.

Bottom line, my application will allow viewing data in the database. For simplicity, for now, everything is pulling from one view. I am at the point where I am formatting the output. (Some formatting based upon variable in the database.)

What I could really use is some type of WYSIWYG editor to lay out the static elements and do the design of the page(s), have it support CSS and mySQL.

So, my question, is there an open source (free) WYSISYG editor for PHP drawn pages with CSS?

Thanks

Descriptive Subjects

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 2:08 pm
by feyd
Please update the thread to have a more descriptive subject.
[url=http://forums.devnetwork.net/viewtopic.php?t=30037]Forum Rules[/url] Section 1.1 wrote:2. Use descriptive subjects when you start a new thread. Vague titles such as "Help!", "Why?" are misleading and keep you from receiving an answer to your question.
There is an editors thread in General Discussion. It is lengthy, but has all the information you need.

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 2:18 pm
by s.dot
If you're in teach yourself mode, i'd recommend staying away from the WYSIWYG's.

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 2:40 pm
by Brik
scottayy wrote:If you're in teach yourself mode, i'd recommend staying away from the WYSIWYG's.
I am using UltraEdit-32 for code work (Its what I have at the moment). I just want WYSIWYG for the grapphical design, look and feel, sort of stuff. I'm not looking for it to write code for me, per se. I would at least like to take a peek at an editor. Searching here and via Google hasn't yielded what I envision I am looking for yet.

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 3:24 pm
by josa
There are a fiew. I don't know if I would recommend any of them...

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

http://www.trellian.com/webpage/

http://www.kompozer.net/ (bug fixed version of Nvu)

/josa

Follow-up

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2007 9:11 am
by Brik
I looked at the editors joso referred me to.... (Thanks)

Maybe I am not making a connection or I am doing something sort of fundamentally wrong (I'm a newbie remember).

I am writing .php code that displays an HTML page.

I have various ECHO statements, braces, etc outside of my html. Inside my html I also have variables, and other bits of PHP.

Can someone explain to me how an HTML editor, like joso referred me to, will write PHP in a WYSIWYG way?

OR - Would one use such an editor to write HTML and then go back and tweak it by converting it to PHP and changing code where necessary?

Maybe a more broad question - Which usually comes first, the layout/design or the PHP? At the moment I am sort of doing both in parallel. I am no expert in either HTML or PHP. I find it a bit challenging to juggle layout, html and PHP at the same time. Given my challenges I am focusing on the data and application flow and have done very little in the way of design, look and feel. Am I approaching this backasswards?

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2007 12:15 pm
by Begby
There is no wysiwyg editor that will make PHP code that doesn't suck. You really need to code it by hand.

As for which comes first... Either the layout/design or the PHP can come first, it doesn't matter. Both at the same time though might not work too well.

The very first thing though should be your plan or requirements. Lets say your requirements state that you need to read some news articles from the database, then display them on a page. From your requirements you should know that you need to display the article name, the text, and a date.

If you do the layout first then you would use fake data and display some fake news articles all in static HTML. Then you add PHP to the page to make it output the real data.

If you do the PHP first, then you make the PHP code output the news articles in plain old HTML. After its working correctly then you could add style sheets or graphics or whatever.

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2007 2:05 pm
by Brik
Begby wrote:There is no wysiwyg editor that will make PHP code that doesn't suck. You really need to code it by hand.

As for which comes first... Either the layout/design or the PHP can come first, it doesn't matter. Both at the same time though might not work too well.
Now you tell me! :? I am sort of doing both in my simple app at the same time.
Begby wrote: The very first thing though should be your plan or requirements. Lets say your requirements state that you need to read some news articles from the database, then display them on a page. From your requirements you should know that you need to display the article name, the text, and a date.
Done, did that first. My requirement is to display some specific info in a database. (More complex than that but you get the idea)

An initial 'design' was done by someone else in Excel. I am trying to replicate that 'report' on the web. This gives me a general basis for what my final output should sort of look like. The 'report' in excel was actually a lot of data, I created a normalized data model and populated the data in mysql and created a single view that pulled all the data together that would be required for the 'report'. The data also contains 'flags' that indicate things like color shading of certain rows based upon the position of the various flags in each row returned, etc.
Begby wrote: If you do the layout first then you would use fake data and display some fake news articles all in static HTML. Then you add PHP to the page to make it output the real data.

If you do the PHP first, then you make the PHP code output the news articles in plain old HTML. After its working correctly then you could add style sheets or graphics or whatever.
Well, I'm not sure my PHP is really 'done'. I AM pulling all the rows form the view in the DB, I am coloring certain rows as required, I am filling a background image (instead of a solid color) as shading for other rows, etc. I suppose I just want to do a bit more design of my report to look more like my spreadsheet. I'm finding it a bit tedious to mix PHP and html. I'm not fully understanding, yet, how css, html and PHP SHOULD play together versus what I have done so far. ALL of the tutorials will go through very specific examples of specific things in either PHP OR HTML OR CSS OR MYSQL, very few explain how all of those things really should work together.

I hope I'm not ticking folks off by asking all my simple questions. I think after writing this response I am maybe ready for a new thread with a specific question.

Thanks all for taking the time to respond.