Accessing variables within included files

[pablogosse]

Hi all. Here's the situation.

I'm building a template driven website. Each included file will contain the content for that page, and is simply put into the chosen template. However, the menu will be different on each page, as well as the title, so I'm in a bit of a quandry as to how to access individual menus and titles.

Here's what I was thinking. Each content page starts like this:

<?php
!isset($site) ? header("Location:/index.php?page=about") : "";
//About UNBC
//aboutmenu.inc.php
?>

where "about" is the page specified, so it could also be a filename, ie. "?page=faculty.php"

I built another method into the class which reads the included file into an array using the file() function, and assigns it to the variable $file_contents in the class.

Then I can simply set the title and menu file using the following code:

$this->title = substr($this->file_contents[2],0,2) == "//" ? substr($this->file_contents[2],2) : "UNBC";
$this->menu = substr($this->file_contents[3],0,2) == "//" ? substr($this->file_contents[3],2) : "default.inc.php";

It would seem to me that there has to be a more efficient way of doing this, but other than passing the variables along in the query string, which would require coding them into each link, I'm stuck.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
P.

[acidbox]

There is a better way to do this.

Check out this selection of articles for an understanding of how to develop a template based site.

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/index.php3?cat=3&subcat=35

[pablogosse]

Hmmmm, it would seem to me that the method described in the article by Wee Lep has the same issues I'm facing, though. Namely, as he puts it, forcing PHP to "swallow[ing] and regurgitat[ing]" html code.

However, in the way I'm doing it I think I'm swallowing and reguritating much less code, since all that's happening during the swallowing and regurgitation is I'm reading the content file into an array using file(), and accessing values stored in comments on the first two or three lines and assigning those values to variables in my class.

All my content files will be able to stand alone as files on their own (though if they do, and are not in a template, this will be caught and the file forced into the default template), so I'm not overly concerned about having to replace anything in those files since I build the html here as well as do the programming and all I'm replacing is in the template itself.

I have to say, though, those articles were very good, an in a situation where two separate entities are doing the html coding and the actual programming templates such as those are an excellent solution.

P.