Question

Firstly, I don’t know what to call this thing 🙂 I want to know the key, structure and example how to achieve my goal.

Example, I don’t want create separate file like register.php, login.php, about.php faq.php. Here I want the register, login about, faq ,etc will handle by index.php by example, maybe something like index.php?p=register

How do I create page something like that and what this structure called in PHP programming. Let me know.

Answer 1

To provide a more appropriate answer using Neals code, use basename to filter out non-essential file information:

$page = isset($_GET['p'])?basename($_GET['p']):'main';

include_once "$page.php";

You could also create a “white list” to ensure that only the proper files get included:

 $whiteList = array('faq', 'register', 'profile'); 
 $page = (isset($_GET['p']) && in_array($_GET['p'], $whiteList))?basename($_GET['p']):'main';

 include_once "$page.php";

Both ways should be secure, obviously, the white list will be a bit more so. This tact, depending on how you do is generally referred to as “BootStrapping” IE, one entrance page to access the rest.

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UPDATE

To further the security, I would set a variable, $included would be sufficient, to add to the pages that are being included. This would prevent direct access to them (assuming that register_globals is turned off like it should be, so something like:

 $whiteList = array('faq', 'register', 'profile'); 
 $page = (isset($_GET['p']) && in_array($_GET['p'], $whiteList))?basename($_GET['p']):'main';

 $included = true;
 include_once "$page.php";

Then on $page.php at the top you would have something like:

<?php

if (!$included)
       die('Accessing the file directly is not allowed.');

Which would prevent calls to http://yoursite.com/register.php from being allowed to dish out the file. This has it’s negatives to it. Instead of putting the files you are going to be including in the webroot, I would put them outside of the webroot or in an .htaccess protected directory, which would ensure that users could not access them directly and must access them through the index.php.