Building your website with cached dynamic modules

JP

In this article I will show how to use a modular system to create a website that is constructed on the fly using dynamic modules, which for performance sake can be cached if you want. Each module is a php script on its own, returning html data to be included in the final html page.

Overview

• php scripted modules that implement functionality (e.g. a style definition, menu or discussion board)
• a parser that can construct the html page by reading input files, determining which modules to call and then combine output of the modules
• files with specific extension (say .my) that specify html + calling tags for each module

Walkthrough

To demonstrate how it works, let's see a file called hello.my:

<title>Hello world</title>
<my-style name=test>
hello world

If a request is being made for index.my, the webserver redirects this request to the php parser, which just scans for <my- .. > tags. It finds the 'style' tag, and looks for the module style.php in its module directory.

The file style.php is included and the function handle_style ($arglist) is called, where $arglist is an associative array of all specified parameters to the tag (here: <?php $arglist[name] = "test"; ?> ).

The handle_style function must return a string containing html. How the module determines the html doesn't concern the system. Say, the handle_style module returns <font face=Arial size=2 color=yellow> and the parser includes this in the final html.

Contents:

The Final HTML
Security
The parse_it function
$buf
Conclusion

Building your website with cached dynamic modules
The Final HTML