Dynamic pages: include specific aside for specific content - php

Question

I have the following code to include pages dynamically:
<div id="content">
<div id="aside">
...
</div>
<div id="main">
<?php
$page = (isset($_GET['page'])) ? sanitize($_GET['page']) : 'home';
if (!include 'pages/'.$page.'.php') require 'pages/404.php';
?>
</div>
</div>
As you can see, the #aside has static content.
I want to include a specific content for the #aside depending on the page selected. For example, if the user goes to 'Home' and 'About', I want the 'default' aside. But if the user goes to 'Documents' I want a 'Sections' aside.
I know I can just include each aside from every page, but that's not effective. I also don't want the user to be hable to set the aside as the main content, so they have to be in different folders or something.
I'd like to know an effective and not so complicated way to do this.
Thanks for taking your time to read this.

Answer 1

You want to keep which sidebar goes on which page in a database, and then query that database for the correct sidebar to include.
A table structure may look like this:
Table sidebars: ID | path | name | more info on sidebar...
Table pages: ID | path | name | more info on page...
Table sidebars-to-pages: page_ID | sidebar_ID
This approach even allows you to place multiple sidebars on a specific page.

Answer 2

What if you did this?
<?php
ob_start();
$page = (isset($_GET['page'])) ? sanitize($_GET['page']) : 'home';
if (!include 'pages/'.$page.'.php') require 'pages/404.php';
$contents = ob_get_clean();
?>
<div id="content">
<div id="aside">
<?php include($aside); ?>
</div>
<div id="main">
<?php echo $contents; ?>
</div>
</div>
and $page.php would look like:
<?php $aside = "sidebars/default.php"; ?>
<p>HTML for #main<br />
goes here</p>

Answer 3

There are a few different ways to do this that are all more-or-less equal. I almost always use a config.php file for sites to hold whatever global information I want every page to have. At the top of every page, you just call
<?php
require_once('config.php');
?>
In that config.php file, you could have an array listing your page names and the file you want included for each page, as well as a function that returns the content, like so:
// this lets you call includes relative to the site root
set_include_path($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
$defaultAsideContent = 'includes/default.php';
$asideContent = array(
'index.php' => 'includes/include-1.php',
'document.php' => 'includes/include-2.php'
);
function getAsideContent() {
global $asideContent;
global $defaultAsideContent;
$content = $defaultAsideContent;
// get the requested page
$pageFull = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
// strip URL variables
$pageParts = explode('?', $pageFull);
$page = $pageParts[0];
// loop throught the array and see if there is specific aside content for the page
foreach($asideContent as $key=>$value) {
if ($page == $key) {
$content = $asideContent[$key]);
}
}
include($content);
}
Lastly, wherever you want your aside content to show up, just do
<?php getAsideContent(); ?>
When you create a new page, if you want specific aside content, just edit your config file. Just FYI, didn't test this at all, probably has bugs, but you get the jist.

Answer 4

Thank you all for your answers and collaboration. Although none of the answers did exactly what I was looking for, they showed me other ways to approach this issue and guided me to decide what method to use.
I came up with what I think is the simpliest way to do this:
I set my folder structure as: pages/aside and pages/main
I set up an array($asides) with the aside files as the keys and the main content files as the values.
Then I check if the requested file exists in the main folder.
If it doesn't exist, I redirect the user to the 404 page. If it does exist, I loop through $asides to see which aside is asigned to that main content page.
If it doesn't belong to any of the establisged asides, then I include the default aside.
$asides = array(
'aside1' => array('page1', 'page2', 'page3', 'page4'),
'aside2' => array('page5', 'page6')
);
$page = (!empty($_GET['p'])) ? sanitize($_GET['p']) : 'page1';
if (file_exists("pages/main/{$page}.php")) {
foreach ($asides as $key => $value) {
if (in_array($page, $asides[$key])) {
$aside = $key;
break;
}
}
if (!isset($aside)) $aside = 'default';
?>
<div id="aside"><?php require "pages/aside/{$aside}.php"; ?></div>
<div id="main"><?php require "pages/main/{$page}.php"; ?></div>
<?php
} else {
header('Location: ?p=404');
}
The bounty goes to Madara Uchiha because in my opinion, his answer is simple an effective. Thanks again to all of you who helped me with this issue.