How to make website pages accessed by code - php

Question

It's pretty hard to explain so if somebody have a better title then be my guest..
Basically I made a website with 5 pages.
1) index.html
2) page.html
3) footer.html
4) menu.html
5) contact.html
In order to access the pages you have to type the page name at the end of the domain (I bet you knew that..)
I wanted to access the pages with a code..
for example -> mywebsite.com\?page=contact
How can I do this ?
Kind Regards,
Kobi.

Answer 1

why don't make a index.php with following code:
<?php
include($_GET['page'].'.html');
?>
The result will be:
calling mywebsite.com/?page=contact will open mywebsite.com/index.php?page=contact because this is default
the url will stay mywebsite.com/?page=contact
the script load the file contact.html and show it

Answer 2

You only need to configure whatever web server you have to look for a file called index.php whenever you don't specify any. That has been a pretty standard feature of all web servers since the early 1990s. In Apache you'll use the DirectoryIndex directive; this is what mine looks like:
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</IfModule>
Then, write PHP code in such index.php to act as router. You should check Variables From External Sources and learn about $_GET.
However, that's probably not the best layout. Friendly URLs have been around for years:
http://example.com/contact
... and it's again mostly a web server feature. In Apache you'd use the mod_rewrite module. Here's a sample rule used by some PHP frameworks:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
Requested path can be parsed out of $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].
Once you put your hands in the index.php file there're a lot of design patterns you can use (modern frameworks often use a third-party router and template engine) but if you're to learn from scratch and just want to get something done quickly from static HTML you can use a combination of switch statements (to create a route white list) and readfile() to inject each file into the output. (Beware that PHP include construct family will handle files as PHP code, which is not what you want.)
<?php
define('INC_PATH', __DIR__ . '/../wherever/includes/are');
switch ($_GET['page']) {
case 'contact':
case 'help':
case 'whatever':
$page = $_GET['page'];
break;
default:
$page = 'error';
}
readfile(INC_PATH . '/index.html');
readfile(INC_PATH . '/page.html');
readfile(INC_PATH . '/footer.html');
readfile(INC_PATH . '/menu.html');
readfile(INC_PATH . "/$page.html");