Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

I’ve just been poring over the code for Phorum, the php message board
code. The code is easy to follow and well written. I commend the folks
who put this together. In addition to using this forum code to run my
site (http://www.winxpforum.com),
I have also planning on porting a lot of code from ASP to PHP. This code
is an excellent primer for how to write a PHP application for the
Web.

In particular, it excels at creating a modular architecture
with templates for each page on the site. You can change the site by
simply editting the templates. By keeping the code and the templates
separate, it makes it a heckuva lot easer on the HTML developer to mold
the forum to fit their site’s template.

Another thing the code does
well is to provide common “hooks” which you can attach events to. An
event can be either a PHP script to include at the appropriate location,
or a PHP function to be called. Using this system, it allows others to
create plug-ins that can easily be integrated into the system. I will
definitely be using this architecture when porting my site administration
tools from ASP to PHP.