some PHP

decibel.places — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:43:38 +0000

some PHP tutorials/references:

If you have a lot of pages,

Greg K — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:26:19 +0000

If you have a lot of pages, it is better to use a database for the lookup, as then you can also set up other features such as pages that require a login, etc.

Although you may be tempted to directly call from the $_GET variable (ie. include ($_GET['page']); but DO NOT DO IT! Never directly call an include (or exec, eval, SQL statements) with unprocessed variables especially from the query string, the easiest way for a visitor to put something other than you planned on.

I agree it is better to look into the mod_rewrite to make the url look more professional.

-Greg

Welcome to the forums,

pr0gr4mm3r — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:08:40 +0000

Welcome to the forums, Anub1s! Hope you come back and visit often.

To answer your question, something like this in your index.php would do the trick:

<?php
    switch ($_GET['page'])
    {
        case 'something':
            include('something.php');
            break;
        
        case 'another_page':
            include('another_page.php');
            break;
        
        default:
            include('404.php');
    }
?>

Using the switch statement, the appropriate page can be loaded based on what is passed to the $_GET['page'] variable. The default section should load a 404 page because that means that a page was requested that didn't meet any of the previous conditions.

I am curious as to why this looks more professional. Pages with query strings are not easily crawled by search engines, and may give your site a lower ranking. Notice that this site does not make use of them. There are other ways to use dynamic URLs without the use of query strings. Apache's mod_rewrite is one of them.