Question

I’ve even looked at CSS Crush, Minify, SmartOptimizer, CSSTidy and a slew of other PHP CSS compressors. But they all have one major flaw.

You can’t use this:

 <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css" type="text/css">

When using dreamweaver, this is the only way to see the DESIGN in DESIGN VIEW. If you replace that styles.css file with styles.php, it breaks, even if you HAVE css code in the file..

I am using minify for my JS and it is working beautifully, but if I use it with CSS, Dreamweaver gets scared and doesn’t know how to render it. haha. Of course, it IS server side though.

Does anybody have a workaround for a situation like this? I do prefer to use dreamweaver because of the immediate changes that can be made in design view, as well as the FTP capabilities and code hinting, but even the new CS6 seems to whine when you use anything BUT a .css file.

Answer 1

I can’t verify that this solution will work, but it should theoretically.

First, you’ll want to add .css files as PHP, so you don’t have to change the file extension. This is good practice regardless, since the file extension should indicate what content is being delivered. I don’t know that there’s any standard that states this outright, but it’s good practice. If you’re using Apache, you can add this to your .htaccess or global server configuration file:

AddHandler php5-script .css

Then, just <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" type="text/css" /> after renaming your file back to CSS. For more details on this, see the Apache docs on AddHandler.

Second, you’ll want to ‘comment out’ your PHP code within your CSS. For example, you could do something like this at the top of style.css:

/*
    <?php include 'your-file-compressor.php'
    // Put any PHP code for compression here
    ?>
*/

That way, Dreamweaver will still read the actual CSS code, but PHP should be able to compress before delivering it to clients.