I know this might be a stupid question...but I am sick and tired of updating my entire website every time I need to make a single change to the layout or color.

I know that I could use SSI, but I have heard that is slows down the loading of pages and such. I have read a few books on PHP and MYSQL, and I understand the basic code, but I need help on how it is put into use.

Like I have noticed on some sites, after the document or page it has something like this:



I just don't get how to do things like that, for example: creating a page that when I change the top or the colors, that it will change everything.

How do major websites like Digg or even this one code their websites? Do they code each portion with html or php and put it in the database or is the database even in effect or helping with the design at all? I need someone to help me with this.

If you guys could find me a script or just explain it to me, it would help tons.

Thanks



This post has been edited by Mr. Jack: May 7 2008, 07:38 PM

To style your site different pages at once, the easiest to use, at least in my opinion is a stylesheet.
A good place to start studying how these css stylesheets work is
http://www.w3schools.com/Css/default.asp

Also worth a visit:
http://www.echoecho.com/css.htm
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss

I hope this helps you on your way.

CSS is the best way to make simple updates to changes like color or layout. If you are wanting to make site wide changes to a certain part (like navigation links or a header/footer) I would recomend creating that in a seperate file and using include('file.php'). That way you can change 'file.php' and the changes will show on all of your pages.

Or maybe a PHP Templating System would do the trick, easily and instantly!
have you tried smarty? http://php.smarty.net

I'm not too sure of how to explain these to you:

?page=content/page .. example index.php?page=guestbook

But I will do my best.

I know them as $_GET variables. To call this data you want to store use this code:

$_GET['page']

$_GET is the method used, rather like $_POST in forms.

To dynamically load pages which is what I think you want to do you want to store the $_GET['page'] in a variable like so:

With that variable, which will have the value of whatever is set in the url, which we discussed in this example would be index.php?page=guestbook.
So, the variable $page will have the value of guestbook

Depending on the method you want to use to load the page (i recommend include) you will need to append a file extension to the variable.

You can do this by either changing the variable $page from:

to

Or by adding a new line which will append the extension. Like so:

That will make the variable $page equal to $_GET['page'] with .php on the end of it
So with our example, if we were to echo out $page.. It would look like

Now that you have the page you wanted to load stored in the variable $page, you can proceed to include that page in your website with the following code:

Alternatively you could use require . Which is exactly the same as include except, as the name suggests, whatever is "required" MUST exist for the script to continue. if it doesn't, it will throw back a fatal error and code below the require code will not be executed.

Creating hyperlinks to these pages is also simple. There is no special code, just put the URL in the hyperlink as you would expect it to look. Let's have a look at it with our guestbook example again.

And there you have it.

Loading Mysql data with that variable can also be done.

It looks a bit like this (you don't need to append the extension).

// Creating the variable of the page name.


I hope that makes sense. It made sense my head atleast haha

This post has been edited by Sp0nge: Jul 1 2008, 12:14 AM