A Guide To PHP Includes - (MEGA Tutorial)

This is an advanced tutorial about the Include function.

This is really useful if you want to create a load of web pages and have data on them that is subject to change.
For example, if I own a company and I have about 200 pages for my website, each page has my contact email. If my email changed and I needed to change that detail on my site, I would have to edit 200 pages.

Ready?

Step 1
Open your favorite HTML editor and copy this code into it;

<?php

$company_name = "Oosbandz";
$contact_email = "contact@oosbandz.com";
$conact_name = "Oosband McOosbandz";
$url = "http://www.oosbandz.com";
$copyright = "Oosbandz 2006, All Rights Reserved";
$phone_number = "0800 666666";
$address_1 = "00 Oosbandz Road";
$address_2 = "Oosbandz, UK";

$header = "header1.gif";
$css = "style4.css";
$stats = "stats.php";
?>

Obviously all that data is made up XD

Save that file as data.php

---

Step 2
Open up any pages you want to include any of the data above on.
Add this code to the top of the page;

<?php include("path/to/data.php"); ?>

Use the directory folder and don't hyperlink.
Example:
(/files/data.php") - Right
(http://www.oosbandz.com/files/data.php") - Wrong

To show the data on your pages add this code to where ever you want it to appear on the web page;

<?php echo $phone_number; ?>

That will diplay the data in the "Phone Number" tag.

This method will save you so much time in updating pages, now you only need to update one file at a time.

---

Step 2.5

You may have noticed I added 3 files to the bottom of data.php.
These don't have to be included but I will show you why I put them there.

If I wanted my pages to have different CSS style sheets, I could place a load of .css files in the same directory as the data.php files, and just load which ever one I wanted by using the same code:

<?php echo $css; ?>

That will load the css file I specified.

This same method can be used for practicly anything. Think of all the fun you could have, you can resize images, create different tables, different header files.

---

Notes

You connot have spaces in the $header (example) tags, instead just use an underscore "_".

The $header (example) tags are case sensitive, meaning $header and $Header would be different items.

Instead of using

<?php echo $example; ?>

you can use

<? = $example; ?>

. It does exactly the same thing, just with less characters.

Nice although you should look into security validations as well.

[gommle]

W00t? That script is completely secure.

You would only have to add some extra security if your script was like this:

PHP Code:

top of page ...
<?php
// Include the page specified. 
// go=.htaccess would include all the contents of the file .htaccess
if(!include $_POST['page']){ echo "Page not found!"; }
?>
... end of page

As you can see in the example there would be a huge security risk for any file that's not parsed by the server.