php code in table

[goldynicholson]

Hello,

I'm pretty new at php/web design and I want to create many templates for my site to separate code and structure. I found out that if I want to customize font for a template, I could put the font code in a table and reference it in the template by doing a query.

I am interested in making these templates more customizeable (so that in the future if I want to change structures for the overall site, I can do that easily). But I am having difficulty putting php code into a table, when I do a query on the table the output is blank; however I can put html code into a table.

Maybe since I'm new I'm being inefficient but here is what I'm doing. I currently have a main template that I use that includes header.php/content.php/footer.php, but I figure that in the future I may want to change the structure. I am currently under the belief that I need to create many of these template files so that I have template file + the content that it is referencing. So if I have 20 different content pages then my template for the 20th page will be something like header.php/content20.php/footer.php (I have a form that creates these files for me). But if I want to add in a side bar in the future then my core template will need to be something like header.php/sidebar.php/content.php/footer.php and so I will have to change each 20 template files.

So my thought is if I use a table to insert the php code into my template file. So the template files will query and echo a portion of the php code and then I can customize this row in the future if I want to change the structure.

For example the template file will do this...
query templatesdb
echo templatestyle
<? php include 'content.php'; ?><br>
query templatesdb
echo templatestyle row2

which will turn into this..
<? php include 'header.php'; ?><br>
<? php include 'content.php'; ?>
<? php include 'footer.php; ?>

and if I want to in the future I can change templatestyle table to put in side bar
so it will turn into this...
<? php include 'header.php'; ?><br>
<? php include 'sidebar.php'; ?> <br>
<? php include 'content.php'; ?>
<? php include 'footer.php; ?>

If theres a more efficient method at doing this please let me know. My only other thought is that I'm using the wrong data type for the field of my table. I am currently using mediumtext.

Thanks

[dagon]

why not look at one of the numerous existing php templateing engines.

[NogDog]

Echoing PHP code will not execute it within that script; it will just send it to the browser, which understands PHP about as well as it understands cuneiform tablets.

You could simply store the file name in the DB, then when you retrieve it from the query, include it.

$result = mysql_query("blah blah blah");
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
   include $row['include_file'];
}