Help Please: tying to master include()

[confusedx]

Happy New Year everyone. I have been working on a site design and finally figured out the layout of my main body template. Now I am kinda stuck with the development as I want to do it in PHP for easy maintenance and the learning experience.

My design includes:
1. Header.php: Page Title, Search key words, etc.
2. Menu.php: Navigation for the site
3. Banners.php: Links to sponsors and friends
4. Body.php :Main content of the site

As I understand PHP Include() and navigation, each click of an Item in the MENU.PHP file (Pictures for example) should launch a pictures.PHP file. This PHP file should include all 4 of the elements above. Right?
What I am failing to understand it is seems my website becomes more complex with this method. My site seems to grow where each page has 4 elements (3 of which are unique to that page - header, banners and body. only menu is the same for all pages).

As I began developing this, I suddenly thought, why not just go back to the old way I used to do it and make each page complete with its own information. forget using includes?

Am I missing something with regards to the benefit of doing PHP include navigation?

Cheers mates.

[TTT]

you have to use some parameters that you can deside what goes where.
ex. navigation href='index.php?banner=1&body=pictures.php&header=1'

// index.php
if(!isset($body)) {
$body = "default_content.php";
}
include("header.php");
include("menu.php");
include("banners.php");
include($body);

// header.php
if(!isset($header)) {
$header = 1;
}
switch($header) {
case 1 :
echo "header 1";
break;
case 2:
echo "other header";
}

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////

i have done static sites with php by using arrays to create content

---

// index.php

if(!isset($dep)) {
$dep = 0;
}
$x = array();
$x[0][0] = "content/def_content.php";
$x[0][1] = "Main title";
$x[1][0] = "content/othercontent.php";
$x[1][1] = "Other title";

// navi
...href="index.php">front
...href="index.php?dep=1">other
...
echo $x[$dep][1]; // title
...
include($x[$dep][0]); // content

[benson]

How i have learned include() is this way:

I have like uhm 5 files:
- index.php
- pictures.php
- chat.php
these three look like this:
<?php
inlcude "header.php";
?>
Main content
<?php
include "footer.php";
?>
Then you need these two:
- header.php
- footer.php

The benefit of this manner is that it won't be confusing , you can just link to an page like de good old html days but now you don't have too type the headers and footers anymore.

hope this helps.

[confusedx]

Thanks for the advice guys. I can see it does seperate the actual pages into discrete blocks but in doing so it builds more blocks.

I can see how it is useful to update content of some pages quite easily that way. Ill give it a go and see what comes out.

I also realise I need to learn a lot more. benson's example was fine for me to understand, but TTT's left me with a few questions.

Thanks and Ill try it out.