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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T18:13:19+00:00

Something basic that i don’t understand: I have header.php with navigation bar for my

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Something basic that i don’t understand:

I have header.php with navigation bar for my site. Inside it, there’s a <head>...</head> section.

Now, in each other page of my site, I’m using require_once 'header.php' so that each page will show the navigation bar. But, I need also specific <head>...</head> sections to the different page.

For example, in page customers.php, I’m using <script>...</script> to include the jQuery library. I don’t need to include it in other pages.

Now, searching the web I see that multiple head tags is wrong syntax.

So, how can anyone:

  1. avoid multiple “head” tags
    WHILE
  2. separating his work to different PHP files and including them ?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You have to change your page structure and employ templates.
    Instead of loading header at the top of the code, you have to do it at the bottom!
    And page code should output not a word, but collect all data in variables.
    And only after that output can be started by calling template.

    A example layout is going to be like this:

    First. page itself.
    it outputs nothing but only gather required data and calls a template:

    <?
//include our settings, connect to database etc.
include dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']).'/cfg/settings.php';
//getting required data
$DATA=dbgetarr("SELECT * FROM links");
$pagetitle = "Links to friend sites";
//etc
//and then call a template:
$tpl = "links.php";
include "template.php";
?>

    Next, template.php which is your main site template, consists of your header and footer:

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>My site. <?=$pagetitle?></title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="page">
<? include $tpl ?>
</div>
</body>
</html>

    And, finally, links.php is the actual page template:

    <h2><?=$pagetitle?></h2>
<ul>
<? foreach($DATA as $row): ?>
<li><a href="<?=$row['link']?>" target="_blank"><?=$row['name']?></a></li>
<? endforeach ?>
<ul>

    easy, clean and maintainable.

    there are many advantages in such approach:

    • as requested, you can populate header with actual page-relevant data.
    • HTTP headers can be sent as well, before any output. It includes cookies, sessions, cache-control and many more.
    • it’s 2011 today. AJAX era. You may wish change your code to return JSONed data instead of whole HTML page. It’s going to be easy using such layout.
    • Imagine you’re going to create very similar site with just different design. You will have to change only templates and don’t touch engine files. That’s really great advantage of using templates.
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