Comments on: How To Setup A Reusable Framework For Your Next Website

By: Save Time by Having a Kick Start Website Framework | Gilbert Pellegrom

Save Time by Having a Kick Start Website Framework | Gilbert Pellegrom — Sun, 02 May 2010 14:16:49 +0000

[...] If your like me and end up making loads of websites and website themes it is essential to have a starter framework in place to save you time and give you a head start when making new websites. The benefits of having a website framework are obvious and all good web developers will have one. [...]

By: Tina Kathleen Nalty

Tina Kathleen Nalty — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:11:59 +0000

Hey there. Thanks for the all of the information on your site. It is fantastic that you share this information.

“May god hold you in the palm of his hand, until we meet again.”, last line of “An Irish Blessing”.

Take care!

By: ClikWiz Website Design

ClikWiz Website Design — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:36:55 +0000

Thanks I’ve been looking for ways to develop a better system. This will save me some time for sure.

By: John

John — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:34:34 +0000

That’s very similar to what I have been doing at work for quite some time now and it’s a great way to kick on with something quickly and efficiently whilst also remaining within budget. I have developed a framework for our own custom bi-lingual cms as well as a nice simple and efficient framework for WordPress.
I’m a big fan of keeping everything neat and organized especially style sheets. I like my code to read the same way as my websites look so that other developers can pick up from where I left off with ease.

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 04:36:03 +0000

thanks for taking the time to share this. good ideas! i’ve kinda done this with a few sites, but not on this level.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:53:38 +0000

Setting up a re-usable framework is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, and reading through all the comments has given an idea of the structure I want to go with. Thanks for a great article!

By: Steve Avery

Steve Avery — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:12:58 +0000

Hi Lee. A good article.

I do something very similar to your set up.

I guess I’m slightly anal when it comes to folder structure. I like every file to have it’s place.

In the root of the project the structure would look something like this:

/a/
index.html
/folderA/index.html
/folderB/index.html
/folderC/index.html

etc.

The directory /a/ is where I store all my ‘assets’ hence the name ‘a’. I don’t name this directory ‘assests’ because there may well be a directory within the site that alphabetically could appear above ‘a’. Therefore by naming it ‘a’ it will always be at the top of the root level meaning I will always know where I can scroll to to access my assets rather than searching in amongst directory names.

Within here the /a/ directory the structure would look like this:

/a/css/screen.css – global screen styles
/a/css/print.css – print styles
/a/img/global/ – global images
/a/img/common/ – images which are common within different sections of the site
/a/img/folderA/ – images for folderA (folderA is an example name for a section)
/a/img/folderB/ – images for folderB (folderA is an example name for a section)
/a/img/folderC/ – images for folderC (folderA is an example name for a section)
/a/js/global/scripts – global JS scripts (jQuery & jQuery library files)
/a/js/common/scripts – common JS scripts
/a/swf/ – Flash files (again could have section specific directories)
/a/dld/ – downloads
/a/dld/pdf/ – PDFs
/a/dld/doc/ – Word Docs
/a/dld/vid/ – Quicktime videos

I’m sure you’ll see a pattern with either 2 or 3 letter naming convention for the directories.

I’ve been using this approach over the last 5+ years and I find that it works great form me. Very efficient and easily viewable when looking through a large site with many directories.

By: Will

Will — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:01:16 +0000

Have a look at this resource for creating a starting point:

http://projectdeploy.org/

By: Amber Turner

Amber Turner — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 03:37:38 +0000

Very nice idea. I thought about doing something like that myself, but it takes alot of time! :D

By: Henrique Erzinger

Henrique Erzinger — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:33:00 +0000

Great post.. all the main modifications i would do were already told by others (like the use of a “css” folder).

Actually, I don’t really have a proper framework. Usually I start my projects from a previous project that I think any similar. It’s kind of a slothful way to do it, but better then nothing. xD”

But I should go and make one eventually…