Multiple pages in one PHP file?

SilasCole

My PHP knowledge is extremely limited--so much so that I may not even be phrasing what I want to do coherently. Apologies! But here's the thing: I know this can be done because I've used it before and I know of a few sites that use it still. I just can't for the life of me remember how.

NogDog

Can you define what you mean by "multiple pages in one PHP file"? Do you mean having different content based on various parameters in the URL (or in cookies, etc.), or something else?

Weedpacket

To continue the reddit post:

I recall a file looking something like this:

header

<PHP coding to display "thispage">
Content for this page.

<PHP coding to display "thatpage">
Content for that page.

<PHP coding to display "thenextpage">
Content for the next page.

footer

And the URLs would look like:
index.php?thispage

index.php?thatpage

index.php?thenextpage

Which looks to me to be completely opposed to any sense of maintainability. Why would you want to do that?

NogDog

Makes more sense to actually have the content in separate files, which you could then include/require into the main page, if you want to do something like that. But then I'd want to use some web server config stuff so that I could just request /thispage and have it rewritten to call /index.php?page=thispage or such, then index.php might do:

$include_path = '/path/to/include/files/';
if(file_exists($include_path.basename($_GET['page'])) {
  require $include_path.basename($_GET['page']));
} else {
  // output 404 error and exit
}

Basically you're then turning index.php into a controller a la the MVC pattern (with the included files being the View part, and no real Models?)

azajali43

Copy and paste the following into a text editor. <html>, go to your code and separate the code into 3 areas and save each with a . php extension, and after do 2 'save as' and duplicate your 'page1. php' and call them 'page2, and last create a new page and call it 'index.php'.