Easy PHP website

Sun, Apr 4, 2010

Development

Most of us know what a pain it is to update a website when the links and content are constantly changing. So I’m going to provide you with a short and sweet bit of code to solve that problem.

It’s nothing fancy but it sure comes in handy. So I’m posting it back up by request of a few people.

The following steps are for a 3 column table with a header and footer. It’s just an example. I prefer divs myself.
:)

  • Create a new folder called “test”
  • Inside your new folder create index.php and place the following code inside:
    • <? //***start of header ?>
<!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" />
<meta name="description" content="myspace stuff galore!" />
<meta name="keywords" content="flash players, layouts, glitters, goth" />
<title>My Site</title>
</head>

<body>
<div align="center">
<table width="800" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td height="100" colspan="3">your banner 800 X 100</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="130" valign="top">
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
links<br />
</td>
<? //***end of header ?>

<? //***start main content ?>
<td width="640" valign="top">this is will all your content will go. </td>
<? //***end main content ?>

<? //***start of footer ?>
<td width="130" valign="top">Google Ad! </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3"><div align="center">&copy; your site 2006 </div></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</body>
</html>
<? //***end of footer ?>
  • Create the following html or php files as well: header.html and footer.html. make sure to delete all code in these new files. Dreamweaver tends to have existing code when you create a new file.
  • Back to your index file. Cut(CTRL+X) everything from
    <?php //***start of header ?>to <?php //***end of header ?>
    and paste(CTRL+V) it into your header.html then save.
  • On the index file cut everything from
    <?php //***start of footer ?>to <?php //***end of footer ?>
    and paste it into your footer.html then save.
  • you should now only have this code in your index.php file:

    • <? //***start main content ?>
    <td width=”640″ valign=”top”>this is will all your content will go. </td>
    <? //***end main content ?>

  • On the very top of your index insert this code

    • <?php
    include(“header.html”);
    ?>

    On the very bottom of your index insert this code

    <?php
    include(“footer.html”);
    ?>

  • Preview your index.php. Looks normal right? Woo!

Now whenever you want to change your banner or add links you only need to edit 1 file. The header.html file.
Whenever you want to change the footer and/or items in the right column like ads, you only need to edit the footer.html
For every new page, IE: contact, album, whatever, all you need to do it copy the index.php and change the content.

Your final product should look like THIS. If you view the source it looks like a simple html file.
Viola! we’ve just saved hours of work.

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