Structural/opinion question

  • jgclarke

    (@jgclarke)


    11 years, 10 months ago

    Hi all- I have a question about high-level/structural theme organization I’d love to get some feedback on. Here’s my issue:

    * I have a site design from a client that has 4 unique page styles:

    1. A one-column right-hand layout
    2. A one-column left-hand layout
    3. A one-column full-width layout
    4. A two column left-hand layout

    And, to make things more complex, there are 8 total pages: 1 page uses style #1, 5 pages use style #2, 1 page uses style #3, and 1 page uses style #4.

    The way I see it, I have two main options for creating the structure to empower the relationship between these layouts and their pages:

    1. I can create a custom template (pagename.php) for each of the individual pages on the site, and then combine styles in the CSS file (so I don’t repeat myself) to
    2. I can inject the page slug into the body tag, so that I can write things like body.pagename [styles].

    The downside I see to each of these options is that the HTML structures are based on variables that are user-surfaced; ie, if an end-user changes the page template or the page slug on the edit page, the front-end website will immediately break.

    That being said, I don’t know of a way that I’d be able to define the structure *without* using a user-editable setting. So if that is my constraint, I think my *best bet* is to use the page slug, since that requires less custom templates (and therefore less duplicated code).

    Does anyone have any other ideas or feedback? Thank you in advance!

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  • Thread Starter jgclarke

    (@jgclarke)

    11 years, 10 months ago

    Quick update: I decided to use custom fields as the solution.

    • I think they’re more safe and reliable than either calling the slug or the template, since I think users are less likely to mess with them; even if they do, they can look at other page examples for context (though they can also do that with custom templates).
    • They’re more extensible, since I can use custom fields more flexibly than having to tie specific layout styles to specific slugs or custom templates.
    • I added fallbacks for all 3 style instances (layout, background image, and logo) to ensure that if custom fields are removed or inserted incorrectly, at the least the site won’t completely break.
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