PHP headers/footers

Anon

This is more of an Apache question, but I figure someone here might have an answer.

I want to have a header (or footer) PHP script dynamically appended to every html page being served by Apache. But I want to avoid adding includes to each file.

The only way I have thought of to do this is to use <a href="http://www.tangent.org/mod_layout/">mod_layout</a>. The problem with the mod_layout method is that it has to generate an http sub-request for the PHP script. This causes problems because I am using PHP session handlers, and the session cookie doesn't go through. This method is also taxing on Apache performance.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Anon

Aren't "dynamically appending" and includes more or less the same thing?

Why would you not want to do includes?

It's pretty standard practise...

Anon

Nick,

Bite the bullet and just add include() statements to each page. Write a script to do it for you if it's tedious. It isn't more than 10 lines of code.

There isn't really a better way to do this, short of hacking PHP source.

jbloom

You could:

1) Use the Apache AddHandler directive to make PHP handle all .html files, e.g:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html

2) Use PHP's auto_append_file and auto_prepend_file configuration parameters to declare the PHP files to append/prepend.

That ought to work.

Anon

Well, the difference would be that instead of having to edit all of the files and add includes, I'd just edit the Apache or PHP config. The reason I don't want to add includes is that this is a multi-user environment where users are uploading their own web pages. This makes it impossible to add includes to each page.

Anon

I got mod_layout to let the session cookies go through. I did this by simply adding "LayoutHTTPOverrideURI *" to the Apache config.