If you ever tried making a simple website with only a handful of pages, you probably noticed that once you need to edit some menu element, you have to edit all of your pages, which can be very irritating.
The simplest way to solve this problem without resorting to coding is using
frames. I encourage you not to do that. You can see
for your self why.
Instead you can apply one of the following PHP techniques.
1) The content include method
In this method you put the unique content of your pages in different files like "news.html", "about.html" etc. While the HTML that is the same for all the pages, like the menu, stays in index.php.
To make this work you need to put the code that will load the contents of your pages into index.php. In PHP the include() function is just what we need to do the job. Alternatively you can use require(), it won't make a big difference.
Next, through our hyper links, we need to tell that function which file it should load into our main page. We need a variable for that, in this example I will call our variable "page" for the sake of simplicity. Which means that our links would look something like this:
<a href="index.php">Home</a><br />
<a href="index.php?page=page1">Page1</a><br />
<a href="index.php?page=page2">Page2</a><br />
<a href="index.php?page=page3">Page3</a><br />
Now we can work with the include() function.
As you probably noticed form our links above, the first link called "Home" doesn't assign any parameters to the "page" variable. To make include() work and protect our website form the Cross-site scripting vulnerability at the same time we will use a switch().
switch($_GET['page']) {
case "page1": include('page1_content.html'); break;
case "page2": include('page2_content.html'); break;
case "page3": include('page3_content.html'); break;
default: include('home.html');
}
Since I chose to call the variable "page" the switch looks this way: "switch($_GET['page']) {" and the next four lines decide which file should be loaded depending on the value of the variable. So the line case "page1": include('page1_content.html'); break; means: if the variable was set to 'page1' then load page 'page1_content.html'.
But the last line: default: include('home.html'); means: if the variable "page" is set to anything else then home.html will be loaded.
One more thing: we have to make sure that the variable $_GET['page'] is set, else PHP will output an error. Therefore we will add this line before the switch():
if(!isset($_GET['page'])) $_GET['page']="";
This line will define the variable $_GET['page']
in case it hasnt already been defined.
(Thanks to Arthur for reminding me)
Now if we put it all together we will get something similar to this:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Website</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="index.php">Home</a><br />
<a href="index.php?page=page1">Page1</a><br />
<a href="index.php?page=page1">Page2</a><br />
<a href="index.php?page=page1">Page3</a><br />
...
<?php
if(!isset($_GET['page'])) $_GET['page']="";
switch($_GET['page']) {
case "page1": include('page1_content.html'); break;
case "page2": include('page2_content.html'); break;
case "page3": include('page3_content.html'); break;
default: include('home.html');
}
?>
</body>
</html>
One of the disadvantages of this method is that all of your pages will have the same title, unless you're willing to write a little bit more code.
2) The menu include method
In this method you have your menu in a separate file like 'menu.html', which you include on all of your html pages like "index.php", "about.php" etc. using this code:
<?php
include('menu.html');
?>
So our typical page would look like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Website</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
include('menu.html');
?>
<h1> Hello and welcome to my website</h1>
The content of the page goes here.
</body>
</html>
This way you can easily have different titles on different pages and easily change your menu on all the pages by editing one file.
In case you have something on the bottom of the page like "All rights reserved" or "This website is a registered trademark..." which is the same on all the pages you can put it in separate file like "footer.html" and include it with the code:
<?php
include('footer.html');
?>
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Some time ago YouTube changed the links on http://www.youtube.com/my_subscriptions so that they would open in the same window even if you click it with the third button/wheel. As much as I tolerate other YouTube changes since Google acquired it, this is beyond me. Thus here is my modified version of the AdBlock+ bookmarklet that reverts the links to the way they were.
