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PHP and EE Tags are not parsed in the Stylesheet
When including PHP and CSS tags in the stylesheet they are not parsed by the template parser.
Parsing PHP and EE Tags in the Stylesheet
When using ExpressionEngine to link to stylesheets, the typical way to do this is by using the standard {stylesheet=weblog/weblog_css} type syntax. When EE uses the {stylesheet=} tag, two special things happen:
- The stylesheet content is sent with the "text/css" header in order to tell the browser that the content is a stylesheet. This is necessary on some browsers such as Mozilla since the stylesheet is not a standard file with a .css extension.
- ExpressionEngine skips over most of the Template engine and simply serves the stylesheet content in a "raw" form. This is done to make the stylesheet be served as quickly as possible and with the least server overhead possible. It also means that PHP and EE tags are not parsed in the Template.
If parsing PHP and EE tags is a requirement then there are two options:
- use the {path=weblog/weblog_css} syntax to link to the stylesheet. That variable will cause EE to parse the Template as normal. However, the stylesheet will [em]not[/em] be sent with the "text/css" header and thus could cause problems in some browsers.
- Use the stylesheet as normal and link to it normally with the {stylesheet=} syntax. For the styles that require PHP or EE tags simply place those in the <head> of your regular pages/Templates and enclose the styles in <style> tags like normal. With this method the dynamic styles are embedded in the regular pages but still link to the external stylesheet for the majority of the CSS.