Question

I am beginning to develop a website as a personal project, to discover a little bit web technologies. My question is more about “how to make the things clean” than a technical question.

Here is the thing:

Let’s say that an index.php page will include an other menu.php, which will permit to navigate the website.

My index.php look like this, basically:

include("header");
include("menu");
include("DEPENDING ON WHICH LINK AS BEEN CLICKED FROM THE MENU");
include("bottom");

To avoid the POST method, and have a lot of stuff on my URL, I would like to do it an other way, but I do not know what is the best one.

I thought about declaring a variable like $page, when a link is clicked, I can do something like “if $page == home”, then I include the home.php page… etc…

I do not know if my question is clear… I know that it will appear as a very easy and beginner question but I don’t even know where to look…

Do you know if I can find any “open source website” so I can study the code and see the best practices about it?

_{P.S.: Sorry for my english which is probably not perfect at all, I am working on it.}

Answer 1

You can have a menu like

<a href="?view=home">Home</a>
<a href="?view=home">About</a>

Then on your PHP code

include $_GET["view"] . ".php";

Note that I am not validating, so any parameter passed on the url would be able to include any file.

The $_GET returns the values passed to the page through the URL.

The $_POST returns values posted.

The $_REQUEST returns both $_GET and $_POST values.

A good place to study many languages is W3Schools, you could check there sometime.