Naming Conventions and Me

My content management system has been my big project at the moment, Its nearly finished, I’m hoping to have it polished and ready for demonstration on the next 2 months. It has taught me a lot of lessons, most of them the hard way, about the way in which to arrange and organize files and folders in the directory structure. Part of the reason the project has taken so long is because I have listened to my after thoughts and taken time to go back and be meticulous in my architecture. As this is what will pay dividends in my ability to maintain and modify the code in future as the system grows.

Whilst I have been on this voyage of self discovery I have found a couple of ways to better organize my information. Im not saying this is the “right way”, each to their own. This is just a method that works well for me and saves over, or under complicating things.

Site Structure

Usually when I design a website I break down the initial folders like so:

This works fine when working on small project where no more than a few pages are required but my new project has meant I have introduced a few new featured into the mix. The idea is to basically have a ‘front’ and ‘back’ end view. So this means that I can use the resources folder for both, saving on code duplication. Let me show you what I mean.

By suffixing the files with what they are, for example classes being called “class.” means that you can keep all your classes together in the folder, this same principle can be applied to absolutely anything else if you want. This is also as great as it means that you dont need to make unnecessary extra folder directories to segregate your code.

I realize to a lot of programmers and developers this would be second nature, but for the not so web savvy this is a simple effective technique to find your way around your site architecture quickly and easily. Happy Coding.