PHP is a very powerful web language. You can use it for almost anything. However, one of the most powerful uses for PHP is for making a content mangagement system (CMS). A CMS is very simple to make. However, there are two main ways to make one.
The query string method is probably the simplest method. There is one main template file (usually named index.php). Content is put in seperate files, and a query string is used to insert other files into the content section of the page. A URL for a page would look like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?page=something
While the URL is kind of ugly, the code is very simple and fast. Here is an example:
index.php:
<!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>
<title>My CMS!</title>
<link rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css" href="/style.css" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Page header</h1>
<div id="nav"><!-- Navigation --></div>
<div id="content"><!--Begin Content -->
<?php
//Check to see if a page is specified.
if (array_key_exists("page", $_REQUEST)) {
$page = $_REQUEST["page"];
//Check to see if the file exists.
if (file_exists($page)) {
//Insert the page
require_once($page);
} else {
//Insert a 404 message.
require_once("/404.php");
}
} else {
//Include the site index.
require_once("/main.php");
}
?>
<!-- End Content -->
</div>
<div id="footer"><!-- Footer --></div>
</body>
</html>
Example of a page:
<h1>Included page!</h1>
<p>This is the encluded content.</p>
<?="You can use PHP too!"?>
As you can see, this method is easy to understand and easy to code. Notice the use of the
require_once function. This inserts the page, and makes sure that it is
only run once. You could also add a @ symbol in front of each
require_once function. This would surpress any error messages in your code. This
is a good idea for professional sites.