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PHP Framework that still allows HTML web editor development

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 8:28 am
by rlangham
I am not a HTML expert, so currently use a very nice Web Editor that has a WYSIWYG editor, themes, auto-create navigations bars, etc. Using this I can create some HTML web sites pretty easy. I would like to know start extending these sites using PHP. I would like to be able to still use the web editor for most of the GUI design. I am interested in the PHP frameworks that will still keep view the HTML code (with embedded PHP) in order to still update and modify via the web editor.

So, this probably limits some of the frameworks. For example, Prado uses syntax such as ...

<com:TForm>
<label>...
<com:TTextBox>
</com:TForm>

and Qcodo is like..

<html><body>
<? $this->RenderBegin() ?>
Id: <? $this->ID->RenderBegin() ?>
....

where the code-behind defines the elements as Form and TextBox, etc.

So, here the HTML view of the template would not be recognizable and re-editable.

Interested in people's recommendations of frameworks that keeps the HTML code looking like HTML code, and which ones do not do this so I do not have to review them. I guess may have to lean toward good template support, but would like to have good framework support in other areas also. Also, AJAX support would be definitely a plus.

Thanks,
Ron

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 9:52 am
by Kieran Huggins
Definitely keep your views separate.

Use the WYSIWYG editor for design if you must (as long as it outputs clean, valid xhtml + CSS) and then use those as templates.

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 10:27 am
by ev0l
Anything that uses smarty might be better. I do believe you can use the Zend Framework with Smarty.

Personally I am not a big fan of templates. I prefer a clean, flexable, and abstracted way of generating HTML programatically with CSS doing most of the layout, but it seams to me that being able to re-edit a template in an HTML editor like Dreamweaver would be one of the advantages of HTML templates. I don't know why a _lot_ of frameworks sacrifice that for what seams like no gain.

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 1:51 pm
by Christopher
You might want to look into template libraries that use string/regexp functions to replace {tag} style tags.

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 6:21 pm
by Ambush Commander
I've found PHPTal produces very WYSIWYG editor friendly templates (given, however, that you can set arbitrary attributes to elements).