How PHP Can Help Save You Time And Mistakes. by Ben Rourke
(c)2004 by Ben Rourke
Here's a really simple way... to maintain and speed up your web site
development.
As your web site grows, so does the problem of maintaining it become more
complex. Even a two or three page site can have a lot of detail in it. If you
want to make any changes to the links or content you have to do so for each
page on the site, and then upload all the new information. All this can be very
time consuming and also create the possibility of errors creeping in, which can
make your site look less professional. This is where PHP can come to your
assistance. I am not going to go into an explanation of PHP here, there are
lots of sites online where you can find out more detail about it, if you wish
to get more involved. Here, I am going to show some simple techniques to help
you with your web site creation and maintenance, thus saving you lots of time
and reducing the risk of errors.
Step 1: How to change information across a complete site easily using PHP.
Say you have a list of links across the top of your page and you want to
maintain these links over a 20 page site. If you were to change one of those
links, you would manually have to do it for the remaining 19 pages also. As you
can appreciate this would be a time consuming process making the changes and
uploading each page seperately. Also the potential to make a mistake is very
great indeed.
However using the method outlined below, you will be able to update complete
sites in no time at all, virtually reducing the possibility of making mistakes
to zero.
The trick is to use PHP to 'include' a header and a footer template called from
your main file 'index.php'
Don't worry if this does not make sense at present as all will be explained
shortly.
Here is an example of a index.php file:
===================================
<?php include 'template/header.php'; ?>
<h1>Place your content here.</h1>
<hr> <img src="3d_congratulation_whitebg.gif" border="0" width="230"
height="65" alt="">
<?php include 'template/footer.php'; ?>
===================================
Point your browser to http://www.seazzypromotions.com/example
to see it in action. View the source on that web page and notice all the HTML.
Where did all that come from you ask? All will be revealed now, and then you
are well on your way to easily generating and maintaining your sites with ease.
Notice the first segment:
<?php
include 'template/header.php'; ?>
You must always include the opening tag: <?php and the ending tag: ?> In
between them we have an instruction to 'include' a file called 'header.php'
which is located in a folder on your web site called 'template'. Obviously
these can be renamed to anything you like.
Now for the second segment:
<?php include 'template/footer.php'; ?>
Again, we have given an instruction to 'include' a file called 'footer.php'
which is also located in a folder called 'template' on your web site, in the
same directory or folder as your 'index.php' file.
To see these files individually go to:
http://www.seazzypromotions.com/example/template/header.php and
http://www.seazzypromotions.com/example/template/footer.php
and view the source code on those pages using your web browser.
Now you can add content to your web pages by inserting or copying and pasting
existing code between the PHP segments of your 'index.php' file as shown above.
That is it! To change any information in the 'header.php' for example, just
open that file in an editor and make your changes. Then save and upload
'header.php' to the 'template' folder on your web site.
Go to 'index.php' and all your changes are magically included. You can see the
benefits of this. If you had a site with 20 pages, all your changes happen on
every page by just editing this one 'header.php' file.
Just 'include' the header and footer files into every other page you make as in
the 'index.php' file, calling your second page for example 'products.php', then
'contact.php' etc. The only thing different between all the pages will be the
content you insert between the header and footer sections.
------------------------------------------------------------
So, if you have put off learning PHP until now, I hope that this has encouraged
you to make a start. There are countless other ways to use PHP and maybe one
day you could even program your own safelist script using it.
Use the source from the examples and make changes to the 'header.php' and
'footer.php' files and see this in action for yourself.
Above all have fun!
About the Author
------------------------------------------------------------ Ben Rourke.
Download Your FREE POP3 Mailbox Cleaner. Works Directly From Your Desktop.
http://www.seazzypromotions.com/software ------
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