I’m developing a site that’s pretty lightweight on the interface and mostly database driven (equal amounts read and write). It’s written in PHP and I’ve found the easiest way to make each page is:
Page:
<?php include("header-nav.php"); ?>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Column 1</th>
<th>Column 2</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Data Point 1</td>
<td>Data Point 2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Data Point 3</td>
<td>Data Point 4</td>
</tr>
</table>
<?php include("footer.php"); ?>
header-nav.php:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Welcome</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="assets/style.css" />
</head>
<?php include("db_connect.php"); ?>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<h1>Welcome</h1>
<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="data.php">Data</a></li>
</ul>
footer.php:
</div>
</body>
<?php mysql_close($dbc); ?>
</html>
All of these pages by themselves are not valid and may produce errors. Working together to create a whole page, they look great.
My question is: Would this be an efficient and easy to maintain solution?
It seems that just adding a couple includes (one at the top and one at the bottom) makes sense. Especially because the site is so lightweight that I don’t need a web framework. It just feels uncomfortable to create pages without starting with <html><head>…etc.
This is definitely an okay thing. I would highly recommend it. This way if you need to change the header or anything you can do so in once place easily. And the read time for hitting the file system for the include really isn’t that big of a concern. So I would say that this is definitely acceptable.