Comments on: ID Your Body Using PHP

By: Jimmy B

Jimmy B — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:16:52 +0000

My shop is mostly Modx CMS based. Luckily Modx makes it really easy to get page specific CSS onto a specific page (or onto a page and all it’s children). It’s very nearly automagic.

Here’s how we do it:
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Dynamic_CSS_with_TVs

By: Bam Roberts

Bam Roberts — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:06:29 +0000

@Bam Roberts:
oops, lost my body tag in the ctrl-c ctrl-v ing.

I end up with

By: Bam Roberts

Bam Roberts — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:31:50 +0000

Hi David,

Good post, I been using something similar to this in my frame work, but i split the sections into an array and then pop them one at a time into the class name.

If I have the url http://www.mysite.com/shop/lenses/canon/50mm-f1.4/details/ i end up with this lets me style by all sorts of extra variables, like having canon specific branding, department background images and differing icons.

With CSS3 you can also write body.lenses.details{…} for even more granular control.

By: seelts

seelts — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:38:58 +0000

”
function generate_id($uri)
{
…
return preg_replace(
array($regex1,$regex2,$regex3,$regex4),
array(‘-’,'-’,”,”),
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']
);
}
”
it will be more logical to use $uri instead $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] in preg_replace() or remove it completely from the arguments list of a generate_id function to ba able to write “$body_id = generate_id();”

but it was an offtopic… now question!
as i’ve understood, you use it to be able to apply different styles, depending of what page is loaded. does it mean that you give to user a css that has all styles for all possible body ids?
doesn’t it perversion? it seems to be easier (and “natural” may be) to generate necessary style sheet or to choose what css will be included before giving it to user.

By: Mullanaphy!

Mullanaphy! — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:33:36 +0000

Interesting. Think I might adopt a method out of this, utilizing either the name of the page’s Class name if it’s PHP or Package name if it’s Perl. Could also look at using it via Namespace::Class (namespace_class).

Very intriguing. You site motivates me to continue developing a programming help blog.

By: David Radcliffe

David Radcliffe — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:12:42 +0000

Nice post, great idea. Looks like your very last example is missing the generate_id() function call.

By: Mattias Wirf

Mattias Wirf — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:25:20 +0000

WordPress does that thing with post-ID but I almost never used it in CSS, becuase I want to write the page/post without changing the CSS every time.
But I guess it would come in use on the body of a page. Hm, I would use the pagename probably, to make it shorter without dirs.

By: Aeron

Aeron — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:06:25 +0000

@Derrick

Check the kilas’s regexp: /[^0-9a-z]{1,}/ – could also be written as /[^0-9a-z]+/ – which means “one or more” instances of a match are written as a single dash. So… same thing…

If we’re comparing functions to generate slugs… I like the one from Cake – which also handles special characters gracefully:

http://api.cakephp.org/view_source/inflector/#line-493

I’ve re-written it for Javascript (had to encode the special characters to avoid problems with YUI compressor):

http://pastebin.com/f4cd741a0

And even Coldfusion (if you like pain):

http://pastebin.com/f597de5ad

By: kilas

kilas — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:47:57 +0000

@Derrick Nelson: Hmm.. I dont understand. Check this:

My method:
Filename: —-1_d——-rzewo’—–.php
Result: mashup-1-d-rzewo-php

by David:
Filename: —-1_d——-rzewo’—–.php
Result: mashup-1-d-rzewo-php

Give some examples.

By: Aeron Glemann

Aeron Glemann — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:41:18 +0000

I had to do something like this on a recent project. Only thing is I needed a more versatile solution. For example, what if you want your CSS from one page to inherit from another page. You can do that with ID’s if you have one ID nested inside another. But you can’t have one BODY tag nested inside another, so I went with DIVs. This also let’s me load one page within another (for example, loading into a modal window) and preserve all the styles of the original page – so long as all relevant styles target the ID’s. If you also use the ID’s to target Javascript behavior same thing – load a page into another page and preserve all original behavior. Anyway, result is here – worked well so far: http://www.cafebritt.com