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Site Start Template Boilerplate

Installation / Usage

  1. Download the complete project package
  2. Unzip/copy files into the location you will be building your site
  3. Configure your development server (anything capable of parsing PHP) to serve files from the public_html folder
  4. Start building your new site by editing the provided header and footer includes
  5. Duplicate template.php for each new template type or page you're building
  6. Maintain reference.php with comment markup patterns used in your project

JS/CSS Compression

This package supports concatinated & minimized JS and CSS files. To rebuild the minimized versions of files run the script minimize.sh script in util. To view files with the uncompressed version of the files add the ?dev query param onto page urls or create a dev cookie for your domain.

Overview

This is a lightweight template framework for quickly starting web site templates or prototypes, with an emphasis on file organization, defining template requirements, and emplying front end development best practics.

These tools can be used to aid rapid front end prototying, or when building out multiple front end tempaltes that are intended to be passed along to other team members or development firms for back end integration or further development.

Every client or development team I work with tends to run things a little differently, so this project attempts to be agnostic to your own development and authoring standards, which JS libraries or CSS frameworks for layout aid, if you have a favorite or whether you use a pre-processor like SASS for CSS or Coffeescript for JS. Go ahead and use this as a starting point and then add other utilites as desired.

Source Materials

The code in this progress has been massaged and added to based on best practices over the years. It can be traced back to internal development teams and peers at some of my ongoing . Some of the nest practices for markup, css, or js includes were inspired by work on the html5 boilerplate project.

History

As a Freelance Front End Developer often working with established development teams at interactive agencies, and with help from developers at those agencies, I've developed this boilerplate as a means to help manage HTML, CSS and JS development in parallel or before the code meets the application or CMS code. It is organized in a way to help facilitate the definition and documentation of template logic and page level variables and states, and to eliminate the need to duplicate commen page structure or content when building out 5, 10 or more static pages.

What it is not, is a PHP framework intended for use in a production environment. PHP is used solely to facilitate the development of production ready markup, styling and scripting. PHP is used only an "executable psudeo-code" or tempalte logic that can easily be run on many server types or locally with MAMP or similar development tools. Therefore, this framework can be useful even if the web project will ultimately be implemented using other languages or frameworks.

File Structure

  • public_html/ - document root for templates
    • .htaccess - basic config just to insure documents (html5 media formats, etc) are properly served
    • reference.php - used to document and review markup patters (classes, etc) used throughout the build
    • robots.txt - blocks robots as precaution if tempaltes are shared on a public server
    • template.php - used as a blank templates for starting new tempaltes or pages
    • ajax/ - place mocked up ajax responses here
    • css/ - place CSS files here
      • css/img/ - place images used in css / site theming here
    • img/ - place content based images here
    • inc/ - place reusable template fragments here
    • js/ - place JavaScript files here
    • libs/ - place 3rd party libs/plugins here
    • media/ - place video or other media here
  • util/ - packaging and miniziation scripts and utilities

To Do

  • Additional inline documentation
  • Migrate image optimization scripts into project
  • Add basic template utilities for managing project state, cache busting, cookie use, get/post variable inspection
  • Link to PNHTagTest from reference.php

See Also

  • Modernizr - included mostly as an HTML5 shim for IE compatiblity & demo code placement in templates
  • jQuery - included to demo CDN usage w/local fallback & demo code placement in templates
  • PNHTagTest - useful document for reviewing stying of many HTML elements and markup patterns (include it in reference.php)
  • HTML5 Boilerplate - more robust boilerplate for HTML5 site development, if you don't use it, read the source.
  • HTML5 Reset - more simplified 'static' boilerplate for HTML5 site development

Copyright and Software License

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2011 Chris Casciano

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.