When I first heard about OOCSS, I was skeptical. Here was another expert developer with her own pet system for building pages – didn’t we all have something like that in our snippet library?
Plus, the “OO” component of OOCSS seems like kind of a stretched metaphor. It’s not truly object-oriented in the way that many programming languages are.
Plus, if you buy into OOCSS, you don’t get control of source-code order, which I thought was very important.
Nevertheless, I was tired of writing HTML by hand, and if Nicole Sullivan had a streamlined way to build one-, two-, and three-column layouts, with modules that magically worked, I was willing to listen. And the more I worked with OOCSS – particularly the templates and the modules – the more I was hooked.
It’s been about 2 years and I’ve never looked back. I always use OOCSS for new projects. Why not use a system that has been lovingly crafted, tested in the real world, and that works so cleanly?
Over the years I built wrappers in PHP for some of the sometimes-complex HTML structures required by OOCSS. After explaining to a friend why he should use OOCSS (and my PHP libraries that support it), I decided to make my libraries into an open-source project called Phoocs. That’s PHP + OOCSS, shortened into something relatively pronounceable… “fooks!” … sounds a little swear-y, but it won’t make you swear, I promise. If you’re interested in using it, find the source code on github.
I hope you find the library easy and useful. By all means submit suggestions, improvements, or even kudos to the project or to me here at this blog.
