[RESOLVED] Advice Please

JamesBrown

I have an existing web site that works well for me. It is quite large with several hundred HTML pages and it is in a hierarchal structure on the web server. Each page has its own file directory and all the files that support each page are also in that same directory.

I want to add PHP at various places in the existing web site that references a PHP library for database access and other functions.

The question is – How do I organize the site?

I can put the PHP library off the server root (“public/includes/rpcl” for example) but how do I reference the files at this location from other parts of the site? Do I have to place all of the PHP files at this same location or can I have them in the directory structure where they make sense? What is the normal way to do this?

A simple example will help me avoided problems down the way.

Thanks…

bradgrafelman

JamesBrown wrote:
I can put the PHP library off the server root (“public/includes/rpcl” for example) but how do I reference the files at this location from other parts of the site?

One way would be to use full paths each time. $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] should get you the absolute path to the root of your website.

JamesBrown wrote:
Do I have to place all of the PHP files at this same location or can I have them in the directory structure where they make sense?

You can put any files any place you'd like. If you want to use it, all you need to know is the path (absolute or relative) to get to it.

If it's a generalized or common library/script/etc., however, it makes sense to keep a single copy of it in one place.

JamesBrown

Yes that works. Thanks.

The problem I'm left with now is that the path returned from my ISP Apache server has no ending forward slash but my local windows apache server adds the ending forward slash.

Since I would like the code to work on either machine is there some 'trick' to make it come out the same?

bradgrafelman

You could always [man]rtrim/man the slash off.

EDIT: Note that if you do so, it would be best to use the predefined constant DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR rather than assuming that the delimiter used is a forward slash (which it might not always be).