Hi folks,

A question on file management, and which is the best way of doing it.

Should I have a seperate folder for each web page and then in each of these, folders for images and anything else associated with the page.

Or, should I have all pages in one folder and all images in another, etc.

Also, depending on which way is best, where should the css file go? In a folder of its own, or at the start of the tree along with all the other files??

Or is it just a matter of your own preferance in which way that you are used to doing your own file management.

At the moment, I am kind of using both methods, so I would like to know which way you guys think is the best.

Thanks

Hi,

Well it's really a matter personal preference. It sounds like having a separate folder for each page would be really complex to manage, but then I've never done it this way. Here's my typical directory structure that I use....



I do change things around from site to site depending on the IA of the site.

Hope this helps!
Rich

Hi Rich,

This is the way I normally do it, but I am doing a redesign of a site for a guy in work at the moment and he asks a million questions. I want to have myself covered when I am exlpaining my structure to him.

Wal

I do the same as Rich.

I do almost the same as Rich. I'm not quite as organized and sometimes if it's a small site I might just lump everything together.
However each different business gets it's own folder.
Inside that I break it into sub folders.

If I do a redesign, I add folders such as 2008css, 2008js, 2008icons, etc.
That way I always have the old stuff separated from the new stuff.

Regarding the redesign, his old site has everything lumped into the www folder. There is no file structure at all, i.e no folder for images etc.

When he is happy with the new site and structure, I think it will be easier to blow away all the old stuff, this would be clear up some space for him

I use this structure:

ROOT
-- [source]
---->[images] (for any page design elements such as rounded corners)
---->[css]
---->[php]
---->[js] (javascript)
-- [images] (for content images)

...and then I have some pages in the root, and some pages in subfolders.

I like to put all my non-content stuff in the source folder, because it's out the way when I'm working on content.

This post has been edited by MikeHopley: Apr 25 2008, 05:48 AM

I organize things similarly.



I put every image used on my site in the image folder, even if they're used only once on a single page. I find it a lot easier to manage that way. The only exception to that is if I have a folder with a page that doesn't follow my site's normal design.

I'm late I know, but... I do pretty similar to everyone above but I put a "_" in front of folders for images, js (the one's people don't generally navigate to) and such just to keep 'em up top. Folders vary from project to project of coarse but here's a general outline.

www/
- _css/
- _img/
- _js/
- _inc/
- admin/
- index.php

etc...


----
Ryan, you put every page into a different folder?

This post has been edited by joey: Apr 29 2008, 10:57 AM

I do that too ... like a portfolio page would be in /portfolio/index.xxx. A contact page would be /contact/index.xxx, etc....

what i do is i have alll my stuff like this...

page
page
page
image folder with images
css with css pages
javascript with js pages


and so on and so on

so my links are
www.blah.com/index.xxx
www.blah.com/portfolio.xxx

and so on

I hate it when I end up with multiple pages with the same name.

When going for "pretty urls" why not just use .htaccess: mod rewrite?

When not using a CMS I'll put the main pages in the root dir. Or if running everything from index (small, dynamic website) the add'l pages live in a _pages/ directory

This post has been edited by joey: Apr 30 2008, 11:38 AM

What does it matter when they aren't in the same folder? index being the default page it's just easier that way.

It's something that I started doing before I came to understand the whole .htaccess thing ... I just stuck with it

Well they can't have the same name in the same dir anyway

Ultimately, I s'pose it's not that big of a deal to have files all over with the same name, I would just hate to get 'em mixed up somehow.

If you only have one page open at a time, it doesn't really matter, but more often than not I will have multiple pages open and it can be a pita when it ends up looking like he image in the screenshot I attached below:

Just personal preference. Not attacking anyone.

yes! that is exactly what I don't like either. On the other hand. Most pages I've created use a cms, which has 1 index.php. the rest is handled by the SEO-part of te cms

a bit late in the day, but I am moving towards the following structure for my new site:



all links, images, etc will then be root relative i.e. "/blah/blah/blah.asp" rather than "../../blah.asp"

For ages I've had this kind of arrangement:

- /img/ - All images in one folder. If I have a separate sections which require a lot of images I put them to separate subfolder like /img/gallery/
- /inc/ - My own include files like config, functions etc...
- /lib/ - All third party libraries like Switfmailer
- /tpl/ - Smarty template files
- /css/ - All css files
- /js/ - All javascript files and libraries

All php files go directly under the root.

I know this ain't the best kind of solution but it has served me very well. With ASP.NET I have a lot different setup with ASP.NET special folders but that's another subject.

This post has been edited by Telos: May 2 2008, 05:21 AM

I think, you should have seperate folder for each web page,Once you start linking multiple pages together, it's easy to break the links if you move your pages to a different location.