External PHP-Files

Anon

This may seem like a stupid question to you PHP-Guru's out there.. but here I go anyway.

I am building several websites with PHP. So no need to explain the very basics of it.. i was just wondering, if i make many different pages and i want them all to have the same menu at the top of the page and I don't want to use frames, i can of course do this with PHP, right?

So i used the INCLUDE() function, but nothing really worked. All i really want is one piece of code (that of the menu) which all the several pages retrieve from one seperate txt, php or htm file. So that when i update the menu, it's automatically updated on all pages.

The code for the menu is just plain HTML, no JavaScript or something. Maybe a couple PHP-Codes. Please help me?

mistcat

Well there could be a couple of problems:

first: do you have those pages being parsed as php pages? I.E. you want to make sure that if they are .html files, that you parse those as php pages.

second: its pretty easy if you do something like this:

at top of your page

<?
$pageName = "blah";
include("myfile");
?>
and myfile looks something like this:

<?
print <<<EOT

<HEAD>
<TITLE>$pageName</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Blah blah blah my menu

EOT

obviously you can get way more complex with this basic framework, define the background colors, etc...

nate

Anon

Perhaps you haven't the file to include not in the include path.

See in php.ini: include_path