Website Structure

Question

I\'m pretty new to php and i\'m trying to decide the best way to organize the pages and, using PHP, deliver them. The two (basic) ideas I\'ve had are:

• A bunch o

Answer 1

I've gone in both directions before, and though they both have pros and cons I lean toward your second option, the single main page that contains the layout. This is similar to how master pages work in desktop publishing applications, and ASP.NET has a nice implementation of this idea - not that I'm saying you should switch technologies.

However, if you do go this route, use mod_rewrite to get your paths into the PHP master page, rather than querystrings in your URLs. Your .htaccess file should contain something like:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [S=1]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?path=$1 [QSA]

This basically says if the file they ask for didn't exist, instead of giving a 404 error hand off processing to index.php with the URL path in a querystring variable. So "http://example.com/path/to/page" ends up hitting index.php with $_GET['path'] set to "/path/to/page". From there you can pull content from a database, a flat file, or what have you. You can also choose different templates based on the path requested.