Question

For a current project I’m doing I’m using PHP includes for my nav bar to save time when making changes to it. The nav bar is composed of a CSS sprite, which currently caters for the default background image for the anchor tags and the a:hover states. In this case having the same nav bar included on every page via the PHP include obviously works fine as neither of these states need to be conditional to any of the pages.

However, what I want to be able to do is to have a different section of the sprite visible depending on what page the user is currently visiting – just to show them what page they are on.

Without doing a PHP include I could have a different ID or class for each page (i.e. “page1Current”) and just change the CSS accordingly. However, using the PHP include method I can’t seem to work out a way to get around this.

I’m guessing that, using a bit more PHP, it would be possible to use some sort of IF statement to get the page address and use that to conditionally alter the CSS accordingly. Unfortunately I’m a total PHP beginner so I can’t quite get my head around it.

I’ve not posted any code as I’m just looking to get the right idea, but if it helps I can post some.

Any help would be appreciated 🙂

Rich

Answer 1

You don´t need more php, you can set a class or id to every page on the body tag and give all your links a separate class as well.

If for example the id of your contact page is contact and the class of the contact link in the navigation menu is contact you can style that button on just that page using:

#contact .contact {
  // highlight button
}