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0 pointsjraph2mo ago0 comments

(1) What about it? (note that I don't manage websites with a large number of pages)

(2) It's easy to add if conditions that test $_GET, $_POST or $_REQUEST display different things depending on what was submitted

(3) Not often (but have in the past, and will probably have to soon in a personal project). What issue are you anticipating?

0 comments

PaulHoule2mo ago

(1) It's a problem if you have 2 or 3 (never mind N where N is large) different web pages that have the same stuff at the top of the bottom. I mean you can have

  <?php include("header.php") ?>
  ... body ...
  <?php include("footer.php") ?>

but...

(2) ... in either case it is just as easy to write

  <?php
  ... some "router" that tests $_GET, ... to set $body_file ...
  include("header.php");
  include($body_file)
  include("footer.php");
  ?>

where you have the option of putting headers on before you include header.php, showing a different header or footer conditional, etc. This approach is structurally stable and scales with the complexity of your application no matter what you're doing...

(3) ... for instance say you want to write a page that might return a different format depending on the headers, the router can return JSON if that is called for, or XML if that is called for, or HTML inside the site's global template if that is called for.

jraphOP2mo ago

I'll use (1) for when I have a restricted set of pages (say, the usual pages of a site, like home, contact, about ...); body is not in a separate file; and (2) when the number of page is dynamic, say, a site that displays recipes stored in markdown files.

(3) I don't know yet for sure how I'd do it today (I will soon normally), I suppose I would just write different scripts, that can call some shared code. For APIs, people expect something that looks like REST endpoints and I suppose I would return JSON or XML in REST endpoint, but the URL structure that looks good for REST wouldn't for a normal page.

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