Developing web pages in a multi site application

I'm developing several web sites in Kohana using its template system so that one code base is running several web sites using the same back end DB. I'm starting to see a lot of if statements in the views to say if this site do this, if that site do that. It starting to look very non-MVC or Object Oriented. Do other developers have any rules they follow when deciding to开发者_运维技巧 breakout view into separate partial views? I want to reuse as much of the code as possible but not swim in if statement in every view. Any reference would be great also.

If you are using Kohana, you should use modules for stuff you don't want to duplicate for every application. Then you can keep specifics in your application with extended classes or specific settings in config files.

http://kohanaframework.org/3.2/guide/kohana/modules

A lot of if statements are mostly an indication that you need to do refactoring. A large cascading if statement to allow for different sites to be loaded is bad practice in the sense that you make files tightly coupled causing to edit multiple files when you need to make a simple addition or change. Furthermore, it will eventually become ugly if every site needs to load different dependencies or settings or whatever in your if statement.

It's difficult to say what you need to change without seeing the code, but try looking at design patterns like the factory or abstract factory design patterns to create site objects.

A good book that deals with the subject of patterns and best practices with PHP is PHP 5: Objects, Patterns and Practice by Matt Zandstra: http://www.amazon.com/PHP-5-Objects-Patterns-Practice/dp/1590593804. A very good book.

I had a similar issue cropping up with this, to keep the views nice and neat I extended the view class into a theme class. I would give the factory method two (or more) views ie Theme::factory(array('site1/home','default/home'),$data)->bind(...); If a themed view existed it would use that, else just serve up the default. That way I, or someone else less competent could easily override to display structure and view behaviour.

The class looks like this

class Theme extends View {

public static function factory($pages = NULL, array $data = NULL){
  if (is_string($pages)) {
    $pages=array($pages);
  } 
  if (!is_array($pages)) {
    $pages=array(0=>null);
  }


foreach ($pages as $page){
  if ((Kohana::find_file('views', 'themes/'.$page)) !== FALSE){
    return new View('themes/'.$page,$data);
  }
}

throw new Kohana_View_Exception("None of the requested views ':file' could not be found.", array(
            ':file' => join($pages,"' or '"),
  ));
} 
}

You really want ViewModels, only you don't know how to name them yet. Little birds have been tweeting that it'll be in Kohana 3.3 but unless you have a year or so to wait, I recommend trying either View-Model module by Zombor or moving away from Kohana's templating system whatsoever in favour of KOstache (it's Mustache for Kohana)

If for any reason you want to stick with your current codebase, I'd go with splitting the view into several smaller interchangable parts and loading them when necessary (echo View::Factory(($something == 'one' ? 'view_one' : 'view_two')) or a custom written helper would be a nice toy here)