PHP Trick for Bloated OpenSource Software">PHP Trick for Bloated OpenSource Software

If your any­thing like me noth­ing is great until you’ve hacked it apart. How­ever with Open­Source soft­ware many times your hacks and mods will be over­writ­ten every time you upgrade to the lat­est and great­est. So how can one com­bat this task with lit­tle to no hacks?

First off let me say that I’m not knock­ing any soft­ware here, I know that peo­ple pour hours and hours of their heart and soul into build­ing some­thing that can be used by nearly any­body. But as a sea­soned designer I have to gripe about CSS bloat, it’s every­where, tags nested ten to twenty lev­els deep sometimes.

So if you're using PHP, you can always do what I’ve done using the ob_start method (in fact it’s how I’m build­ing the Acronyms for this site currently).

So if you want to change a few things around, this is a pretty good method to help you avoid hack­ing core files to an Open­Source appli­ca­tion. The code below is what you want to place before your file starts, or your con­tent area if you’re just look­ing to change some wording.

This site was built using the Word­press CMS and care­fully loved with CSS for your view­ing pleasure.

Sim­ple array in place, if you were only going to replace one word on the site you could just sur­round it with quotes and put it into the echo str_replace func­tion, I find this use­ful to help remove extra classes and ID’s unnec­es­sary to a CMS, makes my job eas­ier as a designer to keep the Stylesheet well formed.