Useful to re-write the complete project? Get an idea of building an homepage

Question

It seems you want to write your own framework/engine. Ok, there will be purists here who say you should use an established one (off the shelf) but actually the practice of doing this helps you learn a lot about the process and the work involved.

So what should you do? I would you start by identifying the common components, breaking these out to modules you can then include across all parts. OO teaches us the building blocks of code and how to do this approach, so if you do not study this methodology you may get a bit stuck.

Maybe your page/site uses a top/middle/bottom (Header, content, Footer) and these can be broken out to a common file to be called back as objects?

class common
{
    public header()
    {
      print "<html><head><title>My Site</title></head>";
    }

    public content( string )
    {
        print string;
    }

    public footer()
    {
        print "<p>The footer of the page</p></html>";
    }
}

So considering my pseudo code above, you could use:

my $page = new common();
echo $page->header();

my $copy = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cat";
echo $page->content( $copy );

echo $page->footer();

Yes this is PHP notation :) a simple framework like this will lead to more complicated issues to resolve, but the core to completing the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is your discipline.

Try not to get it perfect, get it functional. Once functional, no matter how hacked/bodged, you can evaluate the bad bits and refine. By the sounds of it you are trying to rework existing code and remodel the code and implement best practices, do one - not all.

Purists would argue with me that you should plan your layout and functionality and start from this plan. But you are half way through already right?

Just break it down into small steps, you can do it, I think all the coders here have faced a pet project like this at some stage :)

Good luck!