new clan site, need suggestinons== THANKS :)

[Chadian22]

Hey all. First time posting, was referred here to a friend. Anyways, I'm starting to make a clan website. Ive got 4 basic things i wanna take care of in the template. I want my Banner, my left hand side menu, my body and my footer. I was thinking about using the include("blah.php"); command for those 4 parts , and thats obvious all fine and dandy but when that works for my news section. But then if i wanna start a new page , for perhaps my members, and i wanna change only the body text, i dont wanna be sloppy and copy and paste the news and just do command rearranging. I was wondering if there is anyway to keep the body changing according to the user input by click on the menu, but only chaning the include("body_news.php"); and then to forum, members, etc. and so on, without have to create individual files, so that the template.php stays the same. If you don't catch my drift, but your still intrested in helping a n00b like me, then plz either reply here, or contact me at AIM: chadian22, msn: [e-mail] perferbly, and of last resort , email : [e-mail] THanks for All the Help. My friend told me this was a good responsive forum and a very excellent place to p0st.

=============================

BANNER.PHP

------------|
------------| dynamic changing variable
menu.php--| or something to include different
------------| pages on request, such as news.php
------------| members.php, etc...

------------|

footer.php

THANKS AGAIN

CHAD

[Pig]

Not totally sure I understand, but here is what I got. You want to have one page, and have only the content change?

If so, all you do is pass a file identifier to an include (or an id to a query if you are doing it with a database).

So you would have one page. The links would look like: http://www.domain.com/index.php?file=members

Then were the content would appear, there would be an include like:
if( !isset($file) ) { $file = "welcome"; }
include_once($file . ".txt");

Then if they didn't have a "file" it would go to the main welcome page. welcome, member, etc would all be txt files with the code for just that section. It's better to do with databases as you have much better control, but it's the same idea.

[Chadian22]

thanks =). im getting your drift, i am using a mysql database, how would i go about doing it mysql tho?

[Pig]

Keep all of your files in the table, and then when you want to call the file you would access the page with a url like:
http://www.domain.com/index.php?id=36

Then there would be a query like this:

if( !isset($id) )
{
     $id = 1;
}

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE table_name_id='$id' AND table_name_public='1'");

if( mysql_num_rows(result) != 1 )
{
     echo("Sorry, that article was not found in our database.");
}
else
{
     $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
     echo("
          <b>$row[table_name_title]</b><br>
          submitted by $row[table_name_contributor] at $row[table_name_date]<br>
          <br>
          " . nl2br($row[table_name_content]) . "
          blah blah blah
     ");
}

That's a pretty simple model, but you should get the idea. You look for an id. If it is not there, or it is not marked as "ready for public" tell them so and stop. If it is in there and approved, then print it out.

Of course, you could get much fancier by creating a table of users, and have people log into to create their articles. Then you could do a couple joins and get things like the users email address, number of stories, etc, etc.