I have a web page that over_writes a CSS file when the page admin changes a few attributes through a web form and a database table. My problem is that the browser sometimes caches the old file and ignores the new version. It has been suggested to me that I should use a file versioning scheme that would basically change the name of the file so that I would never have to worry about the browser caching the old version. Is there any other way around this problem besides the versioning scheme?
When including your CSS file in the HTML header, you could simply add a parameter to the query string:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css?v=2">
In your case, you could increment this number programmatically every time the page admin changes something (assuming you have set $cssVersion somewhere):
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css?v=<?php echo $cssVersion; ?>">
You would have to store $cssVersion in a database column or in a file.