Posted by Captain Paralytic on 02/02/07 10:36

On 2 Feb, 08:17, "danep" <danepow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> I've been managing a few websites, all built around the same
> architecture, for several years now, but it's time to hand them off to
> someone else and I'm trying to "clean them up" before I go. It got me
> to wondering how other people structure their sites, and if mine is
> optimal.
>
> For instance, all of the pages on my site are accessible from one
> navigation bar with several subcategories. Each page starts by
> declaring $page_title, $page_category etc, and then including a
> standard headers file, with our logo/banner/database connection/etc,
> and finally including a second navigation bar for whatever category
> the page is in. Then you put whatever content you want on the page,
> and end it by including a standard footers file.
>
> I was considering moving all of the data like $page_title,
> $page_category, and the entire menu/category structure into a separate
> XML file, or an array in PHP. Then, each page would just look like
> "include(headers), page content, include(footers)", and PHP would
> simply lookup the page's file name in the XML table/array, and render
> the appropriate navigation bars, styles, whatever. Somehow the idea
> of having the entire sitemap in one XML file or array seems really
> elegant to me.
>
> Does this sound like a good idea? How do you usually structure your
> pages? Is it even remotely like this? I get the sense that what I'm
> doing now is a sort of a beginner's technique for building dynamic
> websites.

Take a look at: http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/cms-php-mysql.php

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