One of the most powerful features of PHP is its ability to reduce the amount of site maintenance you need to do. By setting up a consistent site template, you can reduce the effort needed to create new pages, and you can also make it much easier to change the design of your entire site. This tutorial takes you through a simple example of how to set up and access a site template.

Throughout two separate parts in this series, the author demonstrates step by step the fundamental principles of PHP in an original real-world Web site example. The Part 1 offers the basics of PHP and features a Webzine that includes an author's page where content providers can enter the text of articles, as well as a front end for presenting this content to the world. In Part 2 of this series, you'll be shown the delivery module presents a menu of stories to the reader, and how the authoring module permits authors to submit stories to a Webzine.

The author writes "PHPLIB templates can grant you an amazing ability to abstract the manipulation of data (in the database as well as in PHP) from its final format, whether that format is HTML, XML, WML, or a formatted e-mail, and some of these ways will be explored here."

This tutorial shows you how to make a site database-driven, but still indexable by search engines. It also explains how to create a site to be co-brandable whose look-and-feel are dependent on which "affiliate" site was being accessed.

This tutorial shows you how to create a template-based Web site using FastTemplate class by <a href=http://www.thewebmasters.net/php/>CDI</a>. By using FastTemplate you can change the look of your entire web site in seconds, use abstract programming without HTML, and your Webpage designer does not need to take care of all that "fuzzy" code.

This article/column describes how to create a simple single table, single template content management system. It shows you how to make a powerful yet simple data driven website using <a href="http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/10112.html">DataMan</a>. You can put a site up in less than 30mins.

BM's DeveloperWorks website has a nice tutorial on Midgard. Written by David Seager, a software engineer at IBM, the article describes setting up a basic Midgard site. The article also does a good job of setting up a general context for what Midgard is and how it works.

Ever needed to get back to a previous version of a C include file, or a PHP script, because the customer changed his mind and decided that he liked "that previous thing" better? Find out how to reduce stress levels - and hair loss - by handing your code over to CVS, the powerful open-source version control system.

Templates can bring order and structure to a web site. This article describes how templates can be used to control the page layout for a site that is currently composed of many pages of static HTML, using a popular template class and a new feature of PHP4.

This code allows you to dynamically create your tables using PHP code. It is perfect for a content management system where you do not know how many rows of data will appear at design time. The class allows you to easily add rows as they are needed without worrying about coding the table's HTML.