PHP: Rewriting paths for resources like CSS/JS

Question

I'm wondering if anyone knows of some tricks for rewriting the paths of web page resources, such as CSS and JS files.

Reason being; I'm working on a little CMS project in PHP, and I want to keep the different site components separated, such as templates, eg:

+- /
   +- classes/
      +- template.class.php
      +- datasource.class.php
      +- cache.class.php
   +- templates/
      +- admin.tpl.php
      +- admin.dashboard.tpl.php
   +- resources/
      +- admin.css
      +- admin.js
      +- jquery.js       
   +- index.php
   +- config.php
   +- bootstrap.php

Most everything is called via bootstrap.php, and the template.class.php class is responsible for building templates out of files from /templates/.

Anyways, should I just be using site-root relative paths for the CSS and other resources when creating the HTML template files? Or is there a more intuitive way of rewriting them that someone is familiar with? I've considered just regexing it all, but I'm curious to know what options are suggested.

Thanks :)

Answer 1

I'd suggest the template specify what CSS/JS files it needs (some syntax like use_javascript('jquery')). Your template builder will inject the appropriate script and link tags into the head of the page. Then you can add other features like dependency resolution (use_javascript('jquery-ui', 'jquery')) later on.

You can look at the REQUEST_URI and FILE/_DIR_ to figure out how to build a relative path to the resources, though generating an absolute path works fine too.