Site design

[sidsel]

I have seen some site using URL's like this:

domain.com/bla.php?action=main
domain.com/bla.php?action=login
domain.com/bla.php?action=contact
domain.com/bla.php?action=download

Whats the advantage of this? I know you have only one file but it must be pretty confusing if you don't make pretty sourcecodes.

[leatherback]

If you load your site from databases it is one of the most convenient ways to get the right data: Parse a variable to identify the section you need.

I use it a lot when building forms.

.../form.php?action=preview
.../form.php?action=submit
.../form.php?action=update

An other part is: you could be redirected to other sections, which are hidden to you: I have written a small downloadmanager which generates links like ...page.php?file=45&action=download. When you click the link a lot of stuff happens which you don't see. All you think is that it is a link to a file-download.

And eer.. The "prettyness" of the sourcecode is not related to the size of the program behind it?

J.
etc.

[AstroTeg]

I use this method all the time and love it. Each to their own though - if it doesn't work for you, don't worry about it. I've talked to some Java guys and they go nuts when they see this being done because they like to have their code compartmentalized which to them means seperate files (I don't mean all Java guys think this way, but just the one's I've talked to).

Advantages for me:

• Organizes site functionality into sections and files. I've got a comments section on my site. I've got a file called "comments.php". It handles adding and deleting comments. I know when I need to update the comments code, I just go to comments.php. When I'm in comments.php, I know I'm not going to be breaking anything except for the comment pages.

• I like to keep my specific functions for specific tasks together in the specific files. No need for them to be library files since the functions are specific enough they are not to be shared with other site functionality.

• Flow. I have one PHP form validation function. I'll re-use my form for add, edit, and delete. I can call up my validation function at any time. Plus, if the validation fails, I can easily, from that file, bounce to another function to redisplay the form with your data and an error message saying what the problem was (happens to be almost the same code to allow you to do an edit). There's other ways of doing this, but one file works well for me for this task.

• Reduce the number of "submit" pages. When I first was developing sites, I thought for every submit you had to have a unique submit page. After a while you end up with a collection of these and then if you named them a little funky, you'd have to go back and figure out which one you're submitting to. One file works because you know it submits to itself.

• Portability? If I wanted to add a comments section to another site, I just need to copy over my comments.php file and it has all the tools/functions I need to get going (well, minus my library code - but lets assume the library code is already in place). Granted, you could say you just copy over a few more files and that would work too. But I find working with 1 file easier.

Its just personal preference after doing a healthy number of sites. I've also used this approach in ASP (JScript), Java, and PHP.