Many pages, but only one file. Good idea?

psychomantum

Hi,

I'm a fairly new php developer, and I'm trying to write a CMS that I can give to other people and use to make other web sites. I thought of a possible way to make it so that all of the pages on my site have only a single base page (more detail later). I was wondering if this was a good idea, or if there will be a potential problem with this. I am using a MySQL database to store all the content on my site.

Here's how it works:

I have one file, called base.php, that includes a header, a call to a function that gets the pages content, and a footer.

The header also includes a function that gets the site navigation menu from the database. When I create a new page in the database it is given a page id number, and I must specify a parent page number. If the parent page is 0, it appears in the main menu. If the parent page is another page's id, it appears as a sub-menu of that page.

When I add content to a page, I must specify which page it is to appear on by including the page id.

The function that gets the page content uses the current page's id and grabs all the content from the database that should appear on that page.

A link on the navigation menu would look like this:

<a href="./base.php?page=<?php echo $sql_result['page_id'] ?>" target="_self">

Once you go to a new page, it grabs the content associated with that page. You never leave the base.php page except when loggin in and doing administration. The login and admin pages are not kept in the database.

Does anyone think there will be a problem doing this? Can anyone offer suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Thora_Fan

So, if I read your post correctly, you would have one admin page (base.php) and have it load other pages (from a database) based on what the user selects.

Quite frankly, I don't see why that would be a problem, and considering I'm one of those types of people who like to keep as little amount of files on my server, I think it's a pretty good idea.

A suggestion I would make is to have your user table have several "switches" in it, so you can turn on and off different types of pages available to the user. For example, I would create a user table like such:

CREATE TABLE UserTable(
ID INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT DEFAULT '0' PRIMARY KEY,
UserName VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
UserPass VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL,
NewsPage ENUM('Off', 'On') NOT NULL,
PollPage ENUM('Off', 'On') NOT NULL,
FAQPage ENUM('Off', 'On') NOT NULL);

What this would do is store a User Name and User Password for logging in (obviously) and then a list of available pages, in this case "News", "Poll", "FAQ". This would only be available to you, and would allow you to control which types of pages users can have on their site.

Anyway, I think it's a great idea, keep me posted on the progress.

psychomantum

Thank you for your input

I have concidered your idea of having "switches" so that certain users have access to certain pages, only I structured it differently.

Whenever a user is created, they are assigned a rank. Each page is also assigned a rank, but only for editing (not viewing). Only users of a certain rank may edit the contents of a page, but all users can view it.

I've concidered adding a "display" rank that would restrict a page from displaying for users below a certain rank. That way, I could create a rank called "registered user" and check for that rank when displaying a restricted page.

The only downside I can get from what you suggested is that I'd have to create a new field in the database for every new page that was created, and then update all the current users once the field was added. That's why I decided to use the information I was already including in the database for the "display" rank.

Also, base.php is not an admin page, it is the "base" file for which all other standard pages are retrieved. The admin page (admin.php) and login page (login.php) are seperate files. I could do them the same way as the rest of the pages, but I thought I could do more securely restrictions by having them seperate.

In case you are wondering, I got this whole idea from message boards. As it is in this and most all boards, they all seem to spawn from a single page. They seem to follow this format:

http://www.someforum.com/board/forum.php?id=2342&thread=213

Thanks again for your input.