What is the function of using php for site links? - php

I am working on a site and the builders have used a mix of php and html for links. For example:
<li>Variable Speed Drives</li>
<li>Corrosion Resistant Baseplates</li>
and
<li>MP Repair</li>
<li>MTA Repair</li>
The php is referenced in another file in this way:
<?php
$pdf_link = "../pdf/";
$external_pdf_link = "../../pdf/";
$video_link = "../video/";
$external_video_link = "../../video/";
?>
My concern is not knowing the function of the php, other than it being a placeholder, and given that the links work both ways, I don't want to break something because I am clueless to its purpose.
In doing my due diligence researching, I ran across this post, which is close, but still no cigar, Add php variable inside echo statement as href link address?. All of the research seems to be about how rather than why. This is the site, and they only used it for the "Downloads" links: http://magnatexpumps.com/
Thank you...
B

There is no right way. They are just different.
Let's forget the PHP for a while. If you have this link in a page:
<a href='about.html'/>About</a>
What will happen? The browser will change the URL of the document. If you are at the root of the site like: "www.example.com", will redirect to "www.example.com/about.html". If you are in a URL like "www.example.com/news/index.html" will redirect you to "www.example.com/new/about". That's why sometimes it is useful to have a variable before, to force a full path URL.
Another case of URL variable interpolation is when you have different systems running in the same url. In this case, you will have to append the system name in order to get to where you want. If you don't know where your application will run if it will run on the doc root, or in a subfolder, use a variable to indicate the base path.

Related

Constant set using define() not working in included PHP file

I have this code inside of my header
<?php
define('RELPATH','http://www.saint57records.com/');
include_once(RELPATH.'sidebar.php');
?>
and an example line of code in the sidebar
<img style="margin:10px;" src="<?php print RELPATH;?>images/logo.png" width="60px"/>
but when it gets to the page it includes the file correctly but all the links inside of the file just print RELPATH instead of the web url like this
<img style="margin:10px;" src="RELPATHimages/logo.png" width="60px"/>
It works fine on the other pages of my website, just not inside of Wordpress. Does anyone know what might be causing this issue?
The short answer is to provide a filesystem path to RELPATH, not a web URL.
The long answer is that when you use a web URL to include a PHP file, the PHP file will be treated like an external source. It will be called remotely, executed in a process of its own, and return the results. A constant defined previously can not have an effect in this remote resource.
If http://www.saint57records.com/ is on a different server, you'll have to pass RELPATH to it some other way, e.g. through a GET variable (which you'd have to sanitize with htmlentities() prior to use.) However, including content from a remote server in this way isn't good practice. It'll slow down your page as it'll make an expensive web request. If the target server is down, your page will time out.

Get Page URL In Order To Use It To Include

So I made a script so that I can just use includes to get my header, pages, and then footer. And if a file doesnt exist a 404. That all works. Now my issue is how I'm supposed to get the end of the url being the page. For example,
I want to make it so that when someone goes to example.com/home/test, it will automatically just include test.php for example.
Moral of the story. How to some how get the page name. And then use it to "mask" the end of the page so that I don't need to have every URL being something.com/home/?p=home
Heres my code so far.
<?php
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/lib/php/_dc.php');
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/lib/php/_home_fns.php');
$script = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']; //This returns /home/index.php for example =/
error_reporting(E_ALL);
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/default/header.php');
if($_GET["p"] == 'home' || !isset($_GET["p"])) {
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/pages/home.php');
} else if(file_exists($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/pages/'.$_GET["p"].'.php')) {
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/pages/'.$_GET["p"].'.php');
} else {
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/default/404.php');
}
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/default/footer.php');
?>
PHP by itself wouldn't be the best choice here unless you want your website littered with empty "redirect" PHP files. I would recommend looking into the Apache server's mod_rewrite module. Here are a couple of guides to get you started. Hope this helps!
The simplest way would be to have an index.php file inside the /home/whatever folder. Then use something like $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] and extract the name if you want to automate it, or since you are already writing the file yourself, hardcode it into it.
That however looks plain wrong, you should probably look into mod-rewrite if you are up to creating a more complex/serious app.
I would also recommend cakePHP framework that has the whole path-to-controller thing worked out.

How to detect the path to the application root?

I'm trying to dynamically detect the root directory of my page in order to direct to a specific script.
echo ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
It prints /myName/folder/index.php
I'd like to use in a html-file to enter a certain script like this:
log out
This seems to be in bad syntax, the path is not successfully resolved.
What's the proper approach to detect the path to logout.php?
The same question in different words:
How can I reliably achieve the path to the root directory (which contains my index.php) from ANY subdirectory? No matter if the html file is in /lib/subfolder or in /anotherDirectory, I want it to have a link directing to /lib/logout.php
On my machine it's supposed to be http://localhost/myName/folder (which contains index.php and all subdirectories), on someone else's it might be http://localhost/project
How can I detect the path to application root?
After some clarification from the OP it become possible to answer this question.
If you have some configuration file being included in all php scripts, placed in the app's root folder you can use this file to determine your application root:
$approot = substr(dirname(__FILE__),strlen($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']));
__FILE__ constant will give you filesystem path to this file. If you subtract DOCUMENT_ROOT from it, the rest will be what you're looking for. So it can be used in your templates:
log out
Probably you are looking for the URL not the Path
log out
and you are not echoing the variable in your example.
Your DOCUMENT_ROOT is local to your machine - so it might end up being c:/www or something, useful for statements like REQUIRE or INCLUDE but not useful for links.
If you've got a page accessible on the web - linking back to a document on C: is going to try and get that drive from the local machine.
So for links, you should just be able to go /lib/logout.php with the initial slash taking you right to the top of your web accessible structure.
Your page, locally - might be in c:/www/myprojects/project1/lib/logout.php but the site itself might be at http://www.mydomain.com/lib/project.php
Frameworks like Symfony offer a sophisticated routing mechanism which allows you to write link urls like this:
log out
It has tons of possibilities, which are described in the tutorial.
Try this,
log out
This jumps to the root directly.
DOCUMENT_ROOT refers to the physical path on the webserver. There is no generic way to detect the http path fragment. Quite often you can however use PHP_SELF or REQUEST_URI
Both depend on how the current script was invoked. If the current request was to the index.php in a /whatever/ directory, then try the raw REQUEST_URI string. Otherwise it's quite commonly:
<?= dirname($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"]) . "/lib/logout.php" ?>
It's often best if you use a configurable constant for such purposes however. There are too many ifs going on here.
I'm trying to figure this out for PHP as well. In asp.net, we have Request.ApplicationPath, which makes this pretty easy.
For anyone out there fluent in PHP who is trying to help, this code does what the OP is asking, but in asp.net:
public string AppUrl
{
get
{
string appUrl = Request.Url.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Authority) + Request.ApplicationPath;
if (appUrl.Substring(appUrl.Length - 1) != "/")
{
appUrl += "/";
}
// Workaround for sockets issue when using VS Built-int web server
appUrl = appUrl.Replace("0.0.0.0", "localhost");
return appUrl;
}
}
I couldn't figure out how to do this in PHP, so what I did was create a file called globals.php, which I stuck in the root. It has this line:
$appPath = "http://localhost/MyApplication/";
It is part of the project, but excluded from source control. So various devs just set it to whatever they want and we make sure to never deploy it. This is probably the effort the OP is trying to skip (as I skipped with my asp.net code).
I hope this helps lead to an answer, or provides a work-around for PHPers out there.

Image upload - Return URL

Hello I build a script that does image uploading and resizing and it all works well, but how can I get the URL from image afterwards? I don't want my Image Source in HTML be like "../img/cat/1.png/" I want it to be like "http://MyIP/img/cat/1.png" I understand that I can just make a variable like $myHost = "http://blabla.com"; and add strip the ".." at the beginning but then it's not so good if I want to use it on other site because I need to replace this all the time. Maybe there is any other way?
You will have to use some kind of solution like what you yourself have mentioned. You can use also:
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']
But it is not 100% reliable because of very different PHP configurations that can occur on different hosting services, and such.
Put your $myHost variable's content into a configuration file that you load up whenever you start your application. If you need to deploy the application on another server and domain and etc, just change the configuration. This is the most common way to deal with this issue.
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I think that you should explore the content of $_SERVER array (e.g. $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).

To convert an absolute path to a relative path in php

I would like to convert an absolute path into a relative path.
This is what the current absolute code looks like
$sitefolder = "/wmt/";
$adminfolder = "/wmt/admin/";
$site_path = $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."$sitefolder";
// $site_path ="//winam/refiller/";
$admin_path = $site_path . "$adminfolder";
$site_url = "http://".$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]."$sitefolder";
$admin_url = $site_url . "$adminfolder";
$site_images = $site_url."images/";
so for example, the code above would give you a site url of
www.temiremi.com/wmt
and accessing a file in that would give
www.temiremi.com/wmt/folder1.php
What I want to do is this I want to mask the temiremi.com/wmt and replace it with dolapo.com, so it would say www.dolapo.com/folder1.php
Is it possible to do that with relative path.
I'm a beginner coder. I paid someone to do something for me, but I want to get into doing it myself now.
The problem is that your question, although it seems very specific, is missing some crucial details.
If the script you posted is always being executed, and you always want it to go to delapo.com instead of temiremi.com, then all you would have to do is replace
$site_url = "http://".$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]."$sitefolder";
with
$site_url = "http://www.delapo.com/$sitefolder";
The $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] variable will return the domain for whatever site was requested. Therefore, if the user goes to www.temiremi.com/myscript.php (assuming that the script you posted is saved in a file called myscript.php) then $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] just returns www.temiremi.com.
On the other hand, you may not always be redirecting to the same domain or you may want the script to be able to adapt easily to go to different domains without having to dig through layers of code in the future. If this is the case, then you will need a way to figuring out what domain you wish to link to.
If you have a website hosted on temiremi.com but you want it to look like you are accessing from delapo.com, this is not an issue that can be resolved by PHP. You would have to have delapo.com redirect to temiremi.com or simply host on delapo.com in the first place.
If the situation is the other way around and you want a website hosted on delapo.com but you want users to access temiremi.com, then simply re-writing links isn't a sophisticated enough answer. This strategy would redirect the user to the other domain when they clicked the link. Instead you would need to have a proxy set up to forward the information. Proxy scripts vary in complexity, but the simplest one would be something like:
<?php
$site = file_get_contents("http://www.delapo.com/$sitefolder");
echo $site;
?>
So you see, we really need a little more information on why you need this script and its intended purpose in order to assist you.
This would be a lot easier to do in the HTTP server configuration. For example, using Apache's VHost
I'm not really sure what you're going for bc this doesnt look like absolute path to relative path, but rather one absolute path to another.
Are you always trying to simply change "www.temiremi.com/wmt/" to "delapo.com"? If thats the case, you just want simple string replacement rather than $_SERVER variables or path functions.
$alteredPath = str_replace("www.temiremi.com/wmt/", "delapo.com", $oldPath);
OR
$alteredParth "www.delapo.com/" . basename($oldPath)
If i misunderstand please explain, I don't know if you need this to be more robust/generic, and you kind of threw me for a loop with "dolapo.com" (when i first thought your title, i originally thought of comparing path to a value from $_SERVER and removing common parts,)
And as mentioned, if you are just trying to make the URL displayed the the user (in the address bar or links) look different PHP can't do this.

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