Question

I’m working on my first, rather big project in php. I decided to build everything from scratch, without any framework.

First I had the following structure:

index.php
includes/            //all php pages, except index.
includes/scripts/    //all php classes that do not print web pages.
styles/              //all my css files.
images/              //all images used on the website.

But this was giving me trouble when including files from within the various folders.

I have now changed it to:

index.php
the rest of my .php files
styles/
images/

All my includes are working properly now, without having to jump between folders. But I feel like I have lost overview on my project.

At the moment I’m a bit lost on how to do things. What is, by the book, the proper way to group my folders and to include my files?

EDIT: I would also like to see some tips on actually including the files. What are some techniques to include a file, no matter where include() is called? A specific example, according to my first structure.

There was a script in includes/scripts, login.php. login.php then included page.php (a simple page template) from includes/. page.php would include several parts of the template (header.php, footer.php). But I also had to call page.php from the files in include/.

This was giving me trouble, because the relative path would be different if page.php was called from includes/ or from includes/scripts/

Answer 1

Your problem was probably caused by relative paths.

This can be solved by using absolute paths eg.:

require_once("/var/www/clients/client05/web29/web/includes/scripts/myClass.php");

To make it easier you can also define constants in index.php (or any other file that will get included every time)

define("WEB_ROOT", "/var/www/clients/client05/web29/web/");
define("INCLUDES_DIR", WEB_ROOT . "includes/");
define("SCRIPTS_DIR", INCLUDES_DIR . "scripts/");

Files can then be easly included

    require_once(SCRIPTS_DIR . "myClass.php");
    require_once(INCLUDES_DIR . "acp.php");