Developing Multipurpose Pages With PHP - Multipurpose Web Pages
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What are multipurpose pages? Put simply, they are dynamic pages that can display completely different content if a certain condition (or conditions) is met. There are both advantages and disadvantages to these types of pages:
Advantages:
- Smaller number of pages to keep track of
- Less space is taken up on your server
- There are less changes to make when you redesign
Disadvantages:
- Pages can become very long (number of lines)
- Processing time is slowed slightly due to a large number of variable checkings
Overall, I believe that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Isn't it a lot easier to keep track of one index page, instead of two? Also, doesn't one 400-line page take up less space than two 300-line pages? For me, that's usually the case, because I always limit the width of a line to the width of my screen, so I never scroll, and all lines are essentially the same length.
If you use CSS, then redesigning is even easier. You can easily setup a layout of the whole page and just jump into PHP when you want to have changing content, like a login box that is replaced by one of those "Welcome, someone, you last visited..." dialogs.
For example:
if ($something == "something") {
echo ($page1);
}
else {
echo ($page2);
} Let me show you a tiny example of a multipurpose page in action. Let's say that Bob has a page with news, and a little log-in box on the right side. He has used the concepts I will present to you -- and explain with greater detail -- in this article to create his page.
Here's Bob's source code:
<html>
<head>
<title>Bob's Login Site</title>
<body bgcolor="#00cc00">
<?php
if ($_POST['login'] == "do") {
$name = $_POST['name'];
$pass = $_POST['password'];
$db_cnct = mysql_connect("localhost", "user", "pass") or die("Could not connect to the database!");
$db = mysql_db_select("users", $db_cnct);
$sql = "SELECT user, pass FROM users WHERE user = \"$name\" and pass = \"md5($pass)\"";
// This is for an encrypted password-protection database
$check_user = mysql_query($sql);
$users = mysql_num_rows($check_user);
if ($users < 1) {
echo ("<center>Invalid Password!</center>");
echo ('<form action="'.$PHP_SELF.'" method="post">');
echo ('<input type="text" name="name"><br />');
echo ('<input type="password" name="password"><br />');
echo ('<input type="hidden" name="login" value="do">');
echo ('<input type="submit" value="Log-in">');
echo ('</form>');
}
else {
echo ("Welcome, $name!");
}
}
else {
echo ('<form action="'.$PHP_SELF.'" method="post">');
echo ('<input type="text" name="name"><br />');
echo ('<input type="password" name="password"><br />');
echo ('<input type="hidden" name="login" value="do">');
echo ('<input type="submit" value="Log-in">');
echo ('</form>');
?>
</body>
</html>Next: Examining The Code >>
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