Can php do this? If so, how?

[Anon]

Ok, my question is more about the how than anything else because I'm almost 100% sure php can do what I want it to. However, having just discovered what it is two days ago, I could really use some help here.

What I'm trying to accomplish is only having to build one html document with all the graphical design, tables, and page layout that I want the entire site to have. In this html document, I only want to have the constant, basic layout stuff and then have some sort of reference in the body for it to retrieve the html body text stuff for that page from various text files, depending on what link the person clicked on.

The idea would be that I'd only have to change one html (php) file if I decided to alter the design of the website and all the text for the sections of the site would exist only in a raw form in other files.

How can I make this happen? If it matters, I don't care the generated pages are indexable by search engines. I'm more than anything just interested in the flexibility this sort of site layout would give me.

Thanks,
Mike

[van__]

Ya, you can do that.
It's called templates, you can write your own or use one of the many PHP template parsers already written.

I believe Smarty Templates is the most popular right one now... since I see the most questions about that parser here.

I know Fast Templates has been around forever and a day, but that uses ereg(), and ereg() sucks for speed.

Do some searching, I'm sure you can find what you're looking for.

[Anon]

Hm., who's doing Fast Templates? If it's still a live project, maybe I should have a look at porting the eregs to pregs...