Dynamic pages

lousir

Hi, in my website template, I have two sidebars, which for the most part, will remain the same throughout.

I'm pretty sure its possible, but perhaps someone can guide me as to how I would go about including a peice of PHP code in each of these pages so that they fill with HTML content from an external source.

for example:
<html>
<table>
<tr>

<td> **PHP CODE TO FILL THIS SIDEBAR** </td>

<td>MAIN BODY SECTION OF WEBSITE</td>

<td> **PHP CODE TO FILL THIS SIDEBAR** </td>

</tr>
</table>
</html>

thanks!!!

ednark

<html>
<table>
<tr>

<td> <?php  include('/path/to/file/left_sidebar.php') ?> </td>

<td>MAIN BODY SECTION OF WEBSITE</td>

<td> <?php  include('/path/to/file/right_sidebar.php') ?> </td>

</tr>
</table>
</html>

<?php
/// left_sidebar.php
echo "<b>this is the left sidebar</b>";
?>

<?php
/// right_sidebar.php
echo "<b>this is the right sidebar</b>";
?>

lousir

Thanks, I tried your suggestion....but didn't get anything....when I opened the individual sidebar PHP pages to see if it was doing anything, the echo statement didn't seem to be doing its job of echoing. Is there something I'm missing in the syntax ?

for example, when I uploaded this to my server and opened it in my browser, I got a blank screen.
<?php
/// right_sidebar.php
echo "<b>this is the right sidebar</b>";
?>

ednark

interesting.. you should be getting something...

is php set up correctly with your server?
can you get php do anything?

can you get this to work

<?php phpinfo() ?>

or this

<?php 
  echo 'Hello World';
?>

TheDefender

Change your file so instead of using an .htm or .html extension, it uses a .php extension. Your webserver can't parse php on files with .htm or *.html extensions. When it comes to the PHP tags, it just skips right over it, because it doesn't know what to do with it...

With the *.php extension, the server knows to parse the php tags <? ?> as PHP, and will parse it accordingly.

lousir

thanks guys, somehow it worked today. I didn't change anything....perhaps something was goin on with the servers my site is on.

thanks again!