Best way to do this

Anon

Greetings,

I have a website that has a total of about 40 pages of info. Each page consists of a table with 2 columns. The left column is constant in everypage and never changes, the right column has data that changes from page to page.

My question is, would it be wise to use include() for the left column, rather than using the same code over and over? That way, if I needed to change something in that column, I could just change the include file rather than changing every single page.

If I were to do this, would every file need to be a .php file?

Thanx

Anon

if your dont wan tthe file to have a .php extension thats fine, but you'll have to tell httpd.conf that it should also look for php code in html files sometimes too.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

then just go like this

of corse you could allways include a html file now too.

include("left_page.html");

Chris Lee

Anon

is the kind of information you display 40 times so different from each other, that you can't just use one page for all of them (i mean thats the point in php ...)?

cya Rob

Anon

how about this

you need two basic pages
index.html
left_col.html

in the index.html file use a switch
statement and a variable passed to the index page like so.

switch($from_user) {
case "page1":
$right_col = "page1.html";
break;
case "page2":
$right_col = "page2.html";
break;

default:
$right_col = "intro.html";
break;
}

include("left_col.html");
include("$right_col");

now all you have to do is setup the variable
that is passed to the index.html page. This should be passed throught the link like

index.html?from_user=page1

this will allow the page to determine what should be outputted.

You will also have to setup apache httpd
to run php when it encounters .html (this was mentioned in an article before)

Just an idea, hope this helps.

Mike J