Question

I have a PHP menu which I include simply via

<?php include_once("includes/blog.php") ?>

I’m trying to figure out how to reformat the link text in the menu if the linked page is being displayed in the browser – e.g. (simple example)

PHP inserts the following links:

One Two Three Four

If Four is clicked and the page loaded, I would like it to appear as

One Two Three Four

Is this possible (I have searched my apologies if I’ve missed something).

Answer 1

You can do this several ways, $_GET vars, $_SESSION data, reading the current page url,

Here is one way to do it….

Make your links so that:

//On your actual page
<style>
.bold{ font-weight:bold; }
</style>

//In includes/blog.php
<?php
echo '<a href="pageone.php?id=1" class="'.(($_GET['id'] == "1") ? 'bold' : '').'">One</a>';
echo '<a href="pagetwo.php?id=2" class="'.(($_GET['id'] == "2") ? 'bold' : '').'">Two</a>';
?>

You’ll need to format that to whatever you have, but hopefully you get the idea.

This part class="'.(($_GET['id'] == "1") ? 'bold' : '').'" Means, If $_GET[‘id’] equals 1, then echo ‘bold’. So if our link that we clicked was pageone.php?id=1, we know we would have a $_GET variable named ‘id’ that was equal to 1. So our class would look like: class="bold". If our page has the .bold{ font-weight:bold; } on it, then our selected link will be bold.

If you aren’t using any framework that keeps track of your pages, then you can use $_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’] to do matching against your link.

See the manual: http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php

If someone typed in http://www.example.com/pageone.php

$_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’] would contain /pageone.php So you could do some more checking like

if($_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’] == ‘/pageone.php’){ echo ‘bold’; }

This is quite an ugly way of doing it, though it may work for your purposes.