Is there a simpler way of doing this?

[w3rra]

I have a stylesheet, which on the navbar places an arrow under the current page.
All it requires is the current page link has the <li class="current_page_item">Current Page</li> style set. All the other pages just have the <li>Other Page</li> attribute.

With my very limited knowledge of php, I wrote the script below which gets the current page name, and then determines where to place the arrow.

<?php
$currentFile = $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
$parts = Explode('/', $currentFile);
$page = $parts[count($parts) - 1];

if ($page == 'index.php') {
echo '<li class="current_page_item">';
} else {
echo '<li>';
}
echo '<a href="index.php">Home</a></li>';

if ($page == 'gallery.php') {
echo '<li class="current_page_item">';
} else {
echo '<li>';
}
echo '<a href="gallery.php">Gallery</a></li>';

if ($page == 'info.php') {
echo '<li class="current_page_item">';
} else {
echo '<li>';
}
echo '<a href="info.php">Info</a></li>';

if ($page == 'design.php') {
echo '<li class="current_page_item">';
} else {
echo '<li>';
}
echo '<a href="design.php">Design</a></li>';

if ($page == 'updates.php') {
echo '<li class="current_page_item">';
} else {
echo '<li>';
}
echo '<a href="updates.php">Blog/Updates</a></li>';
?>

It seems awfully long for what I'm trying to achieve, so I wondered if anyone else has ideas about a shorter script I could use?

I hope this makes sense.

[jeepin81]

I would put your navigation in an array and loop through that array to echo out your <li>'s and put a check to see if you're on the current page.

Here's an example:

//create an array of your navigation 
$nav = array('index','gallery','info','design','updates','blog');

//loop through array
foreach($nav as $p){
	echo '<li ';

//check for current page & add class
if($p.'.php' == $page){
	echo 'class="current_page_item"';	
}

echo '>'.$p.'</li>';
}

[w3rra]

Thanks!
That did the trick nicely, a lot more simple too.

Just out of interest, would the script I was using before have been quite intensive on the sever? It seems my pages load faster now, but that might just be a coincidence.

[Ashley_Sheridan]

The change of code wouldn't have made any discernible difference to the speed the server processes it, so I would put it down to coincidence.

[johanafm]

You never ever have to wonder which is faster if you time it, so for future reference: [man]microtime[/man].

[Bonesnap]

Is this by chance a WordPress site? If it is, WordPress automatically adds certain attributes to the menu items if it's the current page, one of them being current_page_item. I've styled menus in the past using this method.

[w3rra]

Thanks for the Microtime thing, that will come in handy I'm sure.

It's not actually a WordPress site, just a few php pages. I scrambled the code/stylesheet together from lots of different scripts though, so maybe the navigation was taken from a WordPress site.
Thinking about it now, I may have been better off integrating WordPress somehow - will look into that, thanks!