Quick Template question

Dada78

Hello again, I know I ask a lot of questions but this site has some really friendly and knowledgable people here that have really helped me. I would do a google on this but don't know exactly how to search for it. This example here

http://www.blucode.net/testing/index.php?page=main

When you navigate through the menu everything stays the same except for the content for each page. I am trying to figure out how that works.

I have read about this code

<?php
//grab ?page=pagename
$page=$HTTP_GET_VARS['page'];
$page=str_replace('.','',$page);
$page=str_replace('/','',$page);
if ($page != '') {
$pagefile=($page.'.php');
if (file_exists($pagefile)) {
include($pagefile);
}
else if (!file_exists($pagefile)) {
include('404.php');
} }
else {
include('main.php');
}
?>

Problem is I don't know exactly how to use it or where to put it as I read it on a forum topic but it didn't go into detail. So if anyone could tell me or point me to some reading of exactly how
to create a page like this, that would be great. I know it is something easy I a lot of pages are built this way. I like the fact I can build a set template and then just change the content of what's in it.

One last thing how do you make a, I guess you would call it a breadcrumb trail? That's what I always called it. Looks similar to something like this. I.E.

Home > Geocaching Tools > Coordinate Converter

Thanks in advance for the help and suggestions, this site has really helped me and I am really enjoying learning php.

bretticus

Yuck, I hate it when developers do the old "let's pass our URL in the querystring." Not only is it harder to maintain, unless you lock it down, it's a potential security hole. When I come accross this, I honestly think, "how amatuerish!" ...and yes, I'm guilty of coding this way in the past (which is where part of the annoyance of this paradigm comes from.) I did it because at the time (long ago), I thought it was the best way to ecapsulate a Web application for multiple clients (or Websites.) Then I learned that I could more effectively use classes to give me that application base I was looking for without sacrificing security (mind, there are ways to secure this method.) Now the only files I include are my base class code files and headers and footers. This also makes the application more extendible and flexible. That's my two cents. If you really wanna proceed in this direction I will help you. Just say so (and pardon my ranting.)

😃

Dada78

bretticus wrote:
Now the only files I include are my base class code files and headers and footers. This also makes the application more extendible and flexible. That's my two cents. If you really wanna proceed in this direction I will help you. Just say so (and pardon my ranting.)

😃

That is pretty much what I want to do. I want to be able to create a base template. That way when I create a new page I can just add a include statement that when include the header, footer, body etc, If anyone could lead me in the right direction on how to acomplish this I would appreciate it very much. It just seems like the page is faster and much nicer this way. A perfect example is this site. Select something from the menu and everything stays the same, just the content changes. Here is the site I am talking about.

http://www.lonestargeocaching.com/home.php

Thanks in advance for any suggestions and help.

bretticus

/*** First we pull the page name from the GET variable 'page' so this url looks like 
		[url]https://www.yoursite.com/thispage.php?page=results[/url] if we want the the results.php file included.
***/
$page=$_GET['page'];
/*** this part strips out dots and forward slashes to secure things up. I would not rely on this
		as I read something along time ago about using url encoding to circumvent this.
***/
$page=str_replace('.','',$page);
$page=str_replace('/','',$page);
/*** if we DON'T end up with an empty variable proceed ***/
if ($page != '') {
	/*** attache the php extension (this wouldn't work all that great if say, your page has an html extension.) ***/
	$pagefile=($page.'.php');
	/*** check to see if the file really exists. If it does, include it. ***/
	if (file_exists($pagefile)) {
		include($pagefile);
	} else if (!file_exists($pagefile)) { /*** this is DUMB code as we have a boolean expression here (one or the other)
		In other words, an *else* is sufficient. Anyways, we don't have a real file so we include a file called 
		404.php to tell them, no page here!!! (as opposed to really sending a 404 to the browser (this will be a 
		mess for any SEO promotion.)
	***/
	include('404.php');
	} 
} else {
	/*** If we didn't get a *page* from the URL just include the "main" page by default. ***/
	include('main.php');
}

I would recommend either creating an array of acceptable pages to check against (a bit safer.) you could also use readdir to make an array list of only files in the current directory and check against them if you do not want to have to update this script for each page you will add in the future.