Question

Currently, I have a system that actively generates the pages on my site using PHP, more or less like so:

index.php ——include(query.php);—–> query.php grabs content from a file that corresponds to index.php

Query.php simply assembles the page from the mentioned index.php file and from header, footer, and navigation files.

The index.php file acts as a sort of proxy or label if you will so that when users visit the site, instead of having urls like “query.php?page=index” they have real pages.

The issue of course is that this is a bit convoluted. For each page of the site, I need 2 files: the “wrapper” file (such as index.php) and a content file to which it corresponds. I’d like to only be using a single file. The issue is that the single file should only contain the content of the page – not structure, header, footer etc.

So, what I’d like to be able to do is to be able to have index.php contain ONLYand a paragraph for example. When it is accessed, somehow PHP kicks in and applies a template and the header and footer.

Is PHP too high level a language to be able to do this? I know it is often done with Tomcat and java servlets, but I thought it would be cool to do with PHP.

EDIT: Important point, I don’t want to use GET variables.

Answer 1

It’s a bit hard to tell what you’re trying to do, but have you looked into using a framework such as Kohana or Synfony? This will do pretty much exactly what you’re asking.

If you’re looking for a good template system, I suggest PHPTAL.

Failing that, it doesn’t sound like you need to do anything that special. On the index.php page, why not just include header.php, the content, and footer.php? Short of using auto_append_file and auto_prepend_file, you can’t add content to the page that is not explicitly in the code.

It sounds like what you want to do is route all requests through a single point (like frameworks do). Let’s call it main.php.

On main.php you would have:

include header.php
include $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] . ".php" //Requested file from URL.  TODO handle this better
include footer.php

Then you would route all requests (using your server configuration) to “/main.php/pagename.” Then pagename would only need its respective content.