Easy-updating

PHP Coding Tutorials | Submited Apr 15, 2008

Written by: Mr. Evil [BOFH]

Meh..

Once upon a time (yesterday), I was sick of updating over 100 pages manually for each change that I made to 7B's layout.
Then I had one of those "Why didn't I think of that before?" moments, and decided to use PHP's include() function.
So I split each section of the site into HTML files. For example, if I need to add an extra link to the navbar, I'll change nav.html, and it'll update throughout the site.

Example

In nav.html this is what I have:

<ul>
<li><a href="../linky.php">One</a></li>
<li><a href="../linky2.php">Two</a></li>
<li><a href="../linky3.php">Three</a></li>
<li><a href="../linky4.php">Four</a></li>
</ul>

And on the main page I have this:

<div id="nav">
<?php include('nav.html'); ?>
</div>

And if you use that, and view the page source, this is what you'll see:

<div id="nav">
<ul>
<li><a href="../linky.php">One</a></li>
<li><a href="../linky2.php">Two</a></li>
<li><a href="../linky3.php">Three</a></li>
<li><a href="../linky4.php">Four</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

Simple, huh?