Site navigation question

Anon

Hi, Im re-designing my web page and want to change the way the site is navigated..
at the moment there is an index.php page and the content depends on GET variables.

but what I want to happen is have a base page and the content changes depending on what dir it goes to. for example.

http://www.bob.com/ would be main page
http://www.bob.com/news/ would be news page.

is there a way to do this with out the just redirection pages, from each dir..

someone said something about virtual directories

jamie_webstart

It's actually on this site at http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3

The method I used was to put these lines in your htaccess file:

<Files news>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>
<Files events>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php3
</Files>

Then create scripts called 'news' and 'events' (no extensions). These scripts are run when those directories or any of their subdirectories are called. You can get the subdirectories by using the explode function on $REQUEST_URI.

(You'll notice I've posted a question there, because I can't get it to work for the root level, so at the moment I have a dedicated script for each directory and still use index.php for my first page)

Hope that helps,

Jamie.

Anon

cool tried it out quickly and is exactly what I want,,,
a couple of q's tho.. is the rootdirectory the rootdir? if ya get what I mean... so like do i have to do anything to pathnames for images etc?

and also do I have to add a new File instance to the htaccess for every file I want?

jamie_webstart

thesaint wrote:

cool tried it out quickly and is exactly >what I want,,,
a couple of q's tho.. is the rootdirectory >the rootdir? if ya get what I mean... so >like do i have to do anything to pathnames >for images etc?

I called my images with full URL's, they didn't seem to show up when using a relative path from the directory the script was in... might have been me doing something wrong though.

and also do I have to add a new File >instance to the htaccess for every file I >want?

Yep. There are other methods of doing this kind of thing if you have access to your httpd.conf file (such as modrewrite), but I haven't got access to that myself, so I couldn't help you if you decide to go that route. Basically, every single call to a domain can be routed through one script like that, and the script can then determine from the $REQUEST_URI whether it's supposed to be a news page, events page etc. One quick and dirty workaround I've considered was having an index.php that contained a header("location: main/index.php"); call, so that as soon as you go to the domain you are redirected to a subdirectory called main. You guessed it, that directory would really be a script, and every call to the site would go through it.

I'm sorry I can't be more help, I'm still only playing with this myself...

Jamie.

Anon

just had a thought and is this too messy ? hehe

index.php = Site layout / with area for content.

for example
i call

http://www.bob.com/screenshots/

and that then puts a require(index.php?page=screenshot&number=20) which the index page then outputs the appropriate content from files on server.

is that overly messy? or is there a better way?

jamie_webstart

I don't think you can put a query string on include and require filenames without changing a setting in PHP... I can't do it on my setup at least.

The way I'd do the above is to have a script called screenshots, and explode the $REQUEST_URI to get the number of the screenshot required. The URL you would point to would be 'www.bob.com/screenshots/20'.

Jamie.

Anon

well I know with require() you can have query strings

"
/ Won't work; looks for a file named 'file.php?varone=1&vartwo=2'
on the local filesystem. */
require ("file.php?varone=1&vartwo=2");

/ Works. /
require ("http://someserver/file.php?varone=1&vartwo=2");
"

from manual..

because basically the site has like one page, and the outline never changes only the middle bit where content goes.
with your way would each page like events news etc, would I like have a require() or include() to load top half template, then newspage then bottom half???

Anon

HELP hehe ok's I got it almost what I want
Example- (ignore broken images, not upped yet)
http://www.telefragged.com/warroom/testsite/links

but ya see when the trailing slash comes into play example
http://www.telefragged.com/warroom/testsite/links/

the paths are all screwed up, stop's using http://www.telefragged.com/warroom/testsite/
as a root path (even tho links/ dir dont exisit) so any help on this would be great

jamie_webstart

That is weird. It's because you'd need to add in '../' for each directory, and the trailing slash would make it think it was an extra directory. Maybe at the top you could have a function to count the slashes and make a string for the path, then use that in front of your links, ie,

//at the top
$path_info = explode("/", $REQUEST_URI);
$num_of_dirs = sizeof($path_info) - x; //x is how many directories there are before your script root (testsite)
$path_string = "";
for ($i=0; $i<$num_of_dirs; $i++) $path_string .= "../";

//in every link/img
echo "<img src=\"$path_stringimages/blah.jpg\">";

Please note that's just off the top of my head, i haven't got time to test it until tonight... let me know how it goes if you use it 🙂

The only other thing I can think of is to use full URLs for all the links and images, but that's going to be heavy on download time with too many images.

Hope that helps,

Jamie.

Anon

well I aint tried yet,, but I see what you mean. and am gonna for now just live with using the GET and not worry about virtual directories, so I can get my new site up, and then I will work more on prob solving for this,, so ppl will just have to put up with ugly urls LOL

Thanks for all your help

jamie_webstart

No worries, as I say, I'm thinking about it for my own sites so I may as well think about the problems now 🙂 Good luck with your site...

Jamie.

jamie_webstart

Hope you're still getting emails for this thread... I've just added a code snippet to the article that'll work out relative directories etc like I promised a couple of weeks ago, if that's any help to you.

Jamie.