PHP Includes | Reusable Page Elements

madcat

What's goin' on-

I'd like to include page elements within my documents. They would be the standard header, navigation and footer elements.

But for the header, that would require my title and meta tags be set-up as variables for each new page.

So where exactly do I put the information to fill those variables. On the .html page or the includes page?

Is this the correct assumption? What are some other ways of going about this?

Thanks for any help!

dalecosp

Put 'em in the calling script, not the included one.

Example:

<?php
//index.php

$PageTitle="Welcome to the Site!";
$MetaDesc="The ultimate site about nothing in particular.";
$MetaKW="nothing, ultimate, site, particular, welcome";

include 'header.php';

include 'somecontentfile';

include 'footer.php';

?>

header.php:

<?php
//whatever else goes here

echo "<html><head><title>$PageTitle</title>";
echo "<meta name=\"description\" content=\"";
echo $MetaDesc. "\">";

//etc.,

madcat

Thank you!

And also, would the DOCTYPE and XML namespace declarations normally go into an included header?

Does it really matter if it does or doesn't?

drawmack

or you could make this stuff into a template class and give yourself full error checking instead of relying on the human memory which has more holes then swiss chess.

Here:

<?php

class template {
    var $title,$doc_type,$meta_keywords,$meta_description,$init;

function template() {
    $this->init = 0;
} //end template

function inititialize($title,$doc_type,$meta_keywords,$meta_description) {
    $valid_doc_types = array('doctypestring1','doctypestring2');
    if($title == "" || strlen($title) > 50) {
        die("Please enter a title of up to 50 characters.");
    } //end if
     if(!in_array($doc_type,$valid_doc_types) {
       $valid = implode(", ",$valid_doc_types);
        die("Please enter a valid doc type ($valid).";
    } //end if
etc

AVANT

You can try functions if you want things to be a little more dynamic

such as

function create_header($pagetitle)
{
echo "<html><head><title>$pagetitle</title>";
}

or even both

function create_header($pagetitle,$metadesc)
{
echo "<html><head><title>$pagetitle</title>\n";
echo '<meta name="description" content="' . $metadesc . '">';
}

Have all your functions in one file.

include that one file

include ('funcs.php');

then call the function

create_header(page name, meta description blah blah blah)