Dynamic CSS Switching?

That's sort of what I mean.  I'll have to check his site later tonight to see how it changes with the weather.  I'll take a look around.  I bet there's something on A List Apart.

I checked out Davidson's blog this morning.  The header img changes, but I'm talking about a complete thematic shift.  What you're talking about with the if/then statements sounds about right.  I've never used them before, but I'll mess around with'em this week if I get some time.

After thinking about it a bit more, a cleaner and easier to maintain solution would be to have the night.css file only have those things that apply to the late-night styling and use the following:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="day.css" />
<? if (date('G') < 7 || date('G') > 20) { ?><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="night.css" /><? } ?>

Sorry about writing before thinking.  It's been a long day already.

That is pretty much the same thing Tom (maspick) said. Try it out and see if it works and let us know what happened.

Here's an example of what the contents of that PHP file could look like, substituting the hours of the day with CSS files. I'll do up a working demo webpage a little later tonight. I'm fairly excited about this idea, not sure why.

<?php

$currenttime = date(H);

	if ($currenttime == 1) {
		echo '1:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 2) {
		echo '2:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 3) {
		echo '3:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 4) {
		echo '4:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 5) {
		echo '5:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 6) {
		echo '6:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 7) {
		echo '7:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 8) {
		echo '8:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 9) {
		echo '9:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 10) {
		echo '10:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 11) {
		echo '11:00am';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 12) {
		echo '12:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 13) {
		echo '1:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 14) {
		echo '2:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 15) {
		echo '3:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 16) {
		echo '4:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 17) {
		echo '5:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 18) {
		echo '6:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 19) {
		echo '7:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 20) {
		echo '8:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 21) {
		echo '9:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 22) {
		echo '10:00pm';
	}
	elseif ($currenttime == 23) {
		echo '11:00pm';
	}
	else { echo '12:00am'; }
?>

Nathan -

>>but instead of having the PHP in the link rel, I was going to have it like this...That way, you can easily add new CSS files, and only have to plug them into one PHP file, instead of changing the head of every document.<<

Once we create the first page of a new design and have the elements that are universal to the site determined, I place those in header.inc and footer.inc files so that changes to things like main navigation, etc. only have to be touched in one place and are then adjusted universally for the site.  The actual pages, then, pull in the header & footer files via a PHP include placed inserted at the top and bottom of the document, like:  <? include("header.inc") ?>, which is what most CMS, blog, & other packages do with their proprietary content tags.  Makes for really quick maintenance when the client/pastor wants to add a new page that needs to be in the main navigation.

This is freakin awesome.. exactly what I need for a client who wants 4 different styles to change with the seasons. Looking at your tutorial and code I now understand how I can switch CSS based on minutes, hours and months. But how would you modify this script to switch CSS on a particular date? (In this case Dec 21, Mar 22, June 21 and Sep 21 all at midnight PST)

If you are running PHP5, there are also two functions called date_sunrise and date_sunset, which give you the time of sunrise and time of sunset for a given day and location... I haven't played around with them, but they look like they would be helpful for the day / night css above and would work regardless of the time of year.

Ace: && means "and" while || means "or". Good question thought, since it's not as obvious as the double ampersand. More here...

http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_operators.asp

If you want an "aha" book for PHP, this is the one that did it for me...

http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=10017

We was all noobs at one point, and sometimes I find myself feeling like one despite the time I've put in.  I wish there had been books like Nathan mentioned when I was starting to use PHP so long ago.  Would have made the learning curve a lot smaller.

Winter can be at the end of the year (12/21 thru 21/31) OR the beginning of the year (1/1 thru 3/21), but not both, hence the || (or) rather than && (and).