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Answer 1

+2 A:

Well, it's certainly not an invalid way to do it - but it might be a little cumbersome to read and maintain. I wouldn't say there's a "normal" way to do anything like this in PHP. At the end of the day, you're outputting variables into HTML - so there aren't a variety of options without using a dedicated templating engine (and/or heading towards a more MVC-based approach, as mentioned by ryeguy).

My suggestion: if it doesn't suit your preferred style, change it. The most important thing, if you're going to be developing and maintaining it, is that you can work with it comfortably, and efficiently.

James Burgess 2010-04-15 19:08:02

Answer 2

+3 A:

It's kind of on the right track towards MVC. MVC is all about separation of concerns. The idea here is that the first snippet sets values, and then pageheader.inc outputs them. This keeps logic out of the view.

It's done very sloppily.

ryeguy 2010-04-15 19:09:16

Answer 3

A:

There are essentially two approaches you can use, and they are inverses of each other. You have an example of one approach, where each page has its own content is responsible for including the header, footer, and other common data. There is nothing particularly wrong with this approach. The second approach is to have a single page that is responsible for including the header, footer, and content. This is far more common applications using popular PHP frameworks.

erisco 2010-04-15 19:10:13

Answer 4

+1 A:

PHP is a very fragmented community with no "standard" way of doing things. That said, it appears the pageheader.inc example you posted can be simplified. The code at the top is doing you no good. This alone would suffice:

<html>
<head>
<title><?=@$title?></title>
</head>

If you're looking for some direction on architecture and best practices, I'd highly recommend checking out a popular PHP framework like Codeigniter or Kohana.

Cory House 2010-04-15 19:14:56

For clarity, the `@` symbol suppresses errors. (In this case, a notice that the variable is unset.)

Paul Lammertsma 2010-04-16 07:43:16

Answer 5

A:

I've used that style a lot on simple sites like 5-10 page brochure-ware sites where I want some centralised code e.g creating menus and page headers from a few variables, but don't want a full-blown MVC structure as it's be overkill.

niggles 2010-04-16 07:29:13

Answer 6

A:

You might want to take a look at this article over on oreilly.com :

Understanding MVC in PHP

Robert S. Barnes 2010-04-16 07:34:20

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