Newbie trying to arrange his screen

Anon

I want to set up my screen in a rather standard way: a top, the middle divided in three (left,mid and right) and a bottom. Not too difficult with a few tables.

The problem I have is that for most pages only the mid part is different. As I want to code everything only once (just to keep it maintainable) I wanted to do something like:

MakePage(&function);

where function is a page specific function that just fills the mid of the page. However this something I know how to do in C. I don't know how to do this in PHP.

My question are:
1. How do you do this in PHP?
2. Is this standard coding practice. How do other people handle this?

Please give me your input!

Thanks,

Wim

rob_d

hi Wim,

well there are quite a lot of ways to accomplish what you want:
First of all the good ol' Framesets ... but I think you probably don't want them...
2) My Favorite, use templates ... there are at least 3 Articles on this page dealing with this stuff ...
3) You could include the parts that doesn't change ... Have a file called top.php handling everything in the top part of your page, a file called left.php and a file called right.php (assuming you have any PHP Code in the top left and right ... else you could call the files html :-)) in each of your files where only the mid-part changes you would go sort like this:
<?php
include('./top.php');
include('./left.php');
your code for the mid-part
include('right.php');
?>
4) The function suggestion... I'm not quite sure how you could do it with a function...
Basicly a PHP function is easy to make:
function do_something($param1, $param2)
{
your function code
}
then you call it: do_something(1,2);
must be similar in c i think...
you can also include a file with a function, and use that function in your scripts ... But I'm thinking about your idea for a while now, and still can't find a way it would work, is easy to maintain and doesn't need much code ... hmmm tell me if you find something out ...
But I hope the first three parts help you a bit ...
cya Rob

Anon

This is one of the articles that Rob.D mentioned, I think it solves your problem...

http://www.phpbuilder.org/columns/david20000512.php3

I haven't read the others he mentions, they must be from before I learned php and started reading phpbuilder in october, when I read this one I partially understood it and was rather new at php...

Anon

well, actually I was most impressed by this one :-))

http://www.phpbuilder.org/columns/sascha19990316.php3

To Wim: have a look under ARTICLES/HTML/Templates
if you're interested ... actually there are five now ... must have missed some ...

cya Rob