Dynamic site navigation

jvbates

Hope someone can help me out with something - I'm a HTML/CSS developer who know's a little PHP, which I use to make smaller sites semi-dynamic, I want to expand on what i'm currently doing but need some help.

I currently use PHP to create a single included .php file that contains the navigation, that knows via a variable hard-coded in the XHTML page, what section that page is from and them marks the navigation <li> with a class the highlights it.

Here's the code I currently use

XHTML page

<?php
//Section identifier - numbered or named'
$Section="section1"
?>

Included navigation.php file

<li<?php if ($Section=="section1") echo " class=\"selected\""; ?>><a href="#" title="">Home</a></li>

So (eventually) I get to my question... Rather than having a variable written into the top of each page, could I create a globals.php file that's included from everypage that knows what section that page is is from it's parent folder.

So if I hard-coded the folders/variables in this page, then the page recognises which folder it's from and applys that variable to the navigation.php

Any help much appreciated

Jay

Installer

Instead of using a third script, you could put something like this in your included file:

$path_info = pathinfo($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']);
$dir_name = strrchr($path_info['dirname'], '/')
switch ($dir_name) {
    case '/dir_1':
        // etc.
    case '/dir_2':
        // etc.
}

Edit: Got it right on the third edit (I hope).

jvbates

As I said i'm a bit of a newbie to PHP, so could I ask you to explain what that bit of code's doing?

Installer

"pathinfo()" returns an array containing...path info. "strrchr()" returns a substring of its first parameter ("$path_info") starting from and including the second parameter ("/"). When it's used in an included file, "pathinfo()" returns information about the including file. So if

$dir_name = strrchr($path_info['dirname'], '/')

equals "/dir_1", then that's the directory your script is in. The switch block then executes whatever code is needed, based on that directory.

jvbates

OK, so I get it. It returns the current files parent directory, but what if my site has a nested directory structure? How can I get it to determine the files parent folder - relative to the sites root. In the example below "directoryone"

www.mysiteurl.com/directoryone/directorytwo/index.php

Also what happens if the site's root, isn't on the root of my server, for example;

www.myserverroot.com/dev/testsite/

To make things easier, can I hard-code the sites base url, and get it to work things out relative to that?

Installer

Take a look at and experiment with some of the $_SERVER indexes, such as 'PATH_TRANSLATED', 'SCRIPT_FILENAME', 'HTTP_HOST', 'SERVER_NAME', 'REQUEST_URI', and 'SCRIPT_NAME'. Using some of those, together or not with hard-coding, should get you what you want.