Being the one always trying to boil things down to common patterns, I'm having a hard time figuring out the best and/or recommended ways of managing all those random properties throughout an application. I am looking for some SO wisdom.
What are the random properties I'm talking about? Here's a small list:
- favicon
- alt text for random but common icons like the logo and social icons
- menu titles and nested menu titles
- copyright info
- form and button labels
- default text in form fields
- tooltips
- text like "Leave a Comment" or "Send us an Email" or "Click here to cancel reply."
- featured posts
- author name
The first big project I worked on was customizing the Spree eCommerce System (I'm a Rails guy), and they keep a lot (not all) of that config stuff in deeply nested yaml files which they use in their html templates like <h1>t('checkout_steps.payment')</h1> for example. Then there are things like settingslogic and others which work in similar ways. I like those approaches, but it's still not clear to me if that's the best way to go...
I'm (more than) wondering, how do you, the SO reader:
- Organize your code to effectively manage the upwards of 200+ random settings?
- What kind of system do you have in place? What kind of patterns do you use?
- Do you let your client customize these in some way?
Looking for a nudge in the right direction. Starting out learning how to program, you learn about code separation and explicitly defining classes, and not wiring things together so they become a mess. But custom/random settings/configuration don't seem to follow any of those rules, and they're completely left out of the picture. So I'm just wondering how you think about them. I don't feel like going through the code and changing values throughout a set of HTML templates is the best option....
In short: WTF is a "setting", and how do we use them correctly?
Looking forward to your insight.