I'm a newbie when it comes to PHP. I wrote some JS to make AJAX requests for my project and it worked well, but I don't have any idea how to convert that into PHP.
I've prepared layouts like the following:
In those files are some PHP and MySQL parts that build an HTML page.
In Ajax it was easy to navigate between many users using only one page and replacing some divs with data...
But a huge minus was that you couldn't have a single address reference a user profile or the offer (like mywebsite.com/user1).
Now, when I use PHP I want to achieve same layout effect.
How can I avoid creating a thousands of pages (of course even dynamically it seems to be a waste of memory IMO) like user1.php, user2.php, offer1.php, etc.
I don't know how to achieve the effect of being on a site like example.com/user277373.php without creating thousands of files but only one template.
Two solutions I see is either you use GET to parse your data:
http://example.com/?data=1736861
and than access it over the $_GET variable:
$id = $_GET["data"];
($id will be 1736861)
or you use the flight php extension, that will look something like this:
Flight::route('/id/@id', function($id){
echo "ID: $id";
});
and the URL would look like http://example.com/id/1736861. You can also use multiple variables with the flight module.
I hope this helped, Sebastian
Are you familiar with any MVC frameworks? If not, I would highly recommend getting accustomed to the MVC design paradigm. MVC = Model View Controller. From Wikipedia, a short excerpt:
- A model stores data that is retrieved according to commands from the controller and displayed in the view.
- A view generates new output to the user based on changes in the model.
- A controller can send commands to the model to update the model's state (e.g., editing a document). It can also send commands to its associated view to change the view's presentation of the model (e.g., scrolling through a document).
Two of the key components of MANY frameworks (in pretty much any language), are Routes and Templates. When utilizing a routing system, you're able to specify a template for every page loaded that matches a specific route. For instance, site.com/people/:id where ':id' can be any value in the URL, and be configured to use "person.html" for the HTML output. Note that "person.html" receives variables/data that will dynamically populate content, e.g. <h2>Hello, {{name}}</h2>
So, to clarify, site.com/people/252, site.com/people/12, site.com/people/5, site.com/people/john would all match the site.com/people/:id route path where :id is dynamic, and your system will use ONE TEMPLATE (which you specify) to display all the data. Don't forget, when that route path is met, that's only step 1. You will probably need to take that :id run some database query and pass that data into the template.
A popular micro PHP framework called Slim, might be a good starting point. Here's documentation for its way of handling Routes and Templates: https://www.slimframework.com/docs/objects/router.html https://www.slimframework.com/docs/features/templates.html
Slim is commonly used with Twig, a super popular PHP template engine. Here's its website/documentation: http://twig.sensiolabs.org/
And if that wasn't enough, Slim has a super handy First App Walkthrough that will show you routes, database connection, and templates: https://www.slimframework.com/docs/tutorial/first-app.html
Hope this information helps you on your journey – Best of luck!