Question

Users can submit news and edit them afterwards. My question, should they have the same view file with a few ifs if(page == edit) echo "edit news" else echo "submit news" and similar?

Answer 1

I think sharing the same form for add/edit is the way to go, and much more DRY (Don’t repeat yourself). In Ruby on Rails, it’s a a really good practice/standard to do that.

So yeah, create two views for add and edit, but include the same form in both of your views, so you would have something like:

create.php
edit.php
_form.php

and you would simply include the _form.php in each of the file.

I would still create two views because most of the time you have different texts, images and other things surrounding the form, so if you don’t want to have ifs everywhere, I would create two views to keep things organized and clean 🙂