Most websites I work on these days have some sort of header image on almost every page - an optional “banner” if you will, that adds to the general feel of the current section of the site. Since most of these sites as also managed through a CMS setup (symfony, sfDynamicCMS + custom stuff) it is a requirement to be able to adjust these images on a per-page level, even though most pages share the same image within their section..
In short, we often have a need for flexible customization without putting the user through the nightmare of picking a picture through the admin interface every time they want to create a page.

The solution we came up with is rather simple, yet so elegant that we found it to work in all our sites - we use a storage convention based on the page URL.

For example, let’s take a page with the following url:

http://www.somesite.com/sports/outdoors/hiking

where “sports” and “outdoors” are categories, and “hiking” is a specific activity.

The required flexibility now is that the we wanted to be able to have a base-banner for the “sports” section, be able to (optionally) override this for each sub-category, and for each specific activity. As you can see, mapping the url to a directory in the webroot and working backwards would yield just that nice cascade.

Say for example we needed a banner on said page, we would want to look for the following images (in this order):

"/uploads/banner/sports/outdoors/hiking.jpg"
"/uploads/banner/sports/outdoors.jpg"
"/uploads/banner/sports.jpg"
"/uploads/banner.jpg"

Whichever picture is found first, wins.

We add the “banner” directory to be able to pull the same trick for other assets.. maybe a product manual, or a particular flash file for the footer? Never limit your options..

Now, the code that does this cascading lookup based on url is fairly trivial, but I wanted the whole thing to be very intuitive and simple for our front-end guys, so that they can easily use this functionality from within templates. Turns out this is a perfect case for the ArrayAccess interface, which allows you to access objects via array syntax.

The resulting template code looks as simple as:

$image = $assets["banner"];

and you we even let you specify the file type via an optional extension (defaults to JPG):

$image = $assets["banner.png"];
$document = $assets["manual.pdf"];
$audio = $assets["music.swf"];

As you can see, this setup makes it very easy to distribute general and specific assets throughout your site and administering the files via a wysiwyg or standalone asset manager - without cluttering up the admin area.

Hope you’ll find this as time-saving and elegant as I find it.

Have a great day,
Daniel