PHP Newbie

[minimitt]

I am learning php but during this time I have come across code that looks like
.....post.php3?num=2 what does this do and what is the ? for.

[dolphinsnot]

say you've got a URL like:

www.mysite.net/booger.php3?blah=food&tweet=bird

what it does is run booger.php3 and hand it 2 variables to start with.

$blah = food
$tweet = bird

you can then do things inside booger.php3 like:

if ($tweet == "bird"){
echo "Tweety Bird!";
}else{
echo "I Tawt I Taw A Putty Tat!";
}

that's the gist of it...in this case, post.php3 takes care of posting, and num=2 means post to forum 2 (Coding Help, i believe)....if num had equaled 1, it would relate to form 1 (General Help).

any questions?

-dolphinsnot

[minimitt]

Well what im trying to do, and I've been told you can do this is load one page (index.php) that includes the body section (body.inc) cause its the only thing that changes throughout, the body section included has links to more content on the same site. What I have to do now is make a index.php for each page that i want to include. For example I have in the root dir index.php and body.inc. Within body.inc there is a link to photos/index.php which loads the index in the photos dir which is the same as the root index.php. The only difference is that the body changes to photos.inc. I want to be able to use one index.php and have it change to what ever the body section is..it may be the photos.inc, about.inc but on first load it needs to be body. Does that explain it at all?

[dolphinsnot]

yup...that explains it fairly well....

what i have been doing over the past few months is converting a 1000 page static .html site to being driven by a couple php scripts and a database.

you could easily use one php script to run the whole thing...you could use templates and have your php script plug the right holes in the template based on variables it receives......

the way i\'m doing this in my site is by using what i call a \'URL cloaking device\'...

basically, I have one script called web.php3

when someone wants to go to a page on my site the address is like:

www.mysite.org/web/booger/cheese.html

using the standard \'?\' format to indicate variables, this would look like:

www.mysite.org/web.php3?table=booger&page=cheese

This means \'In the database table \"booger\" find the entry called \"cheese\"...

read this article (and any other article on this site that might be helpful):

http://phpbuilder.com/columns/david20000512.php3

and post here or email me with further questions...

[e-mail]

good luck!

--dolphinsnot

[Anon]

Also its helpful if you make your entire page dynamic so the main menu and any submenus are brought from .inc files. This is useful because sometimes you may want to move outside of your index.php file and still want the same menus. Or you can change the menu content/layout depending on the seleceted content.

Mark