I've come to the conclusion that I am outright fed up with CSS. Organizing it, upkeep of it, repeating the same thing over and over, all of it sucks. What makes matters worse is that everyone has their way of doing it "properly" -- there are 1,650,000 pages that popup for a search of "how to organize css" -- that's insane. Jeff Atwood puts it a bit more concisely...

In short, CSS violates the living crap out of the DRY principle. You are constantly and unavoidably repeating yourself.

Because of the sheer amount of suck this causes so many people there are a ton of fairly nifty tools out there for mitigating CSS' short comings. One of which is called Sass which boasts nested rules, variables, and mixins. I love me some mixins. Despite being a Ruby gem, some good folks have ported the logic to PHP and made PHamlP. Now, I'm way too lazy to just run their code every time I need to make a new CSS from Sass so, I whipped together Sassy, a CakePHP 1.3+ plugin to handle all that for me. It really does nothing more than parsing the Sass files if they're newer than their CSS counterpart. Really. That's it. You can still use any asset packer you like, you don't have to change the way you include CSS files -- you just have to add one line to your AppController. If you felt so inclined though, there are a couple configuration options you have available to you: // Look for files in /path/app/webroot/css/sass and save them to /path/app/webroot/css Configure::write('Sassy.Recompile.Folders', array( '/path/app/webroot/css/sass' => '/path/app/webroot/css', '/path/app/webroot/multiple/folders' => '/path/app/webroot/are/awesome' )); // Make Sassy check for updates on every other request (statistically) Configure::write('Sassy.Recompile.Percentage', 50); // If we get this named parameter in the URL, lets force a check for updates Configure::write('Sassy.Recompile.Parameter', 'recompile'); The plugin is, at the time of writing this, still fairly new so there's a pretty good chance you may run into an issue with it. As always, if you find a problem or want to make it better you should feel free to fork the project and help out.