I'm setting up a website where visitors will be greeted by a splash screen where they will choose a color scheme for the actual website; based on their selection, the actual website will load with a different stylesheet. I gather this can be done by concatenating a flag to the URL, then reading the flagged URL on the next page to determine the stylesheet to be loaded (for example, to load the dark theme, the url would become http://www.mywebsite.com/index-dark; clicking the light theme link would make the URL http://www.mywebsite.com/index-light. Problem is, I don't know how to add a flag to a URL, or how to read this flag on a different page. I've tried Googling the issue, but have found little practical information. How can this be done?
EDIT: I'd like to avoid using two separate pages, as I'll have multiple themes; that would mean copying basically every HTML page in my root multiple times, taking up space. I like the idea of a concealed $_GET variable, though.
Without more information, I can only give some general advice.
So I'm going to assume that you are building a page in PHP, so you could have two different urls and use mod_rewrite to convert /index-dark to /index?style=dark but that's crappy.
What you probably want is to use a cookie or a session. Basically you check a cookie, or session value, for the theme setting and then pick the appropriate CSS file when you generate the page.
This has several advantages:
Doesn't require using url rewriting, an error prone endeavour at the best of times
Allows for persistent setting (if you use a cookie) and doesn't involve complicated urls.
Allows for adding more themes without changing mountains of code, just add the setting to theme selector and the new CSS file.
GET variables are generally only useful for specific data sent with that request, a bit like POST variables are mostly for forms and submitted data. If you want persistent settings, then a session/cookie is the best option.
The "flags" you're mentioning are probably actually $_GET variables that have been disguised using mod_rewrite. What you can do is edit your .htaccess file to add in rewrite rules that change, say, www.mywebsite.com/index.php?style=index-dark to www.mywebsite.com/index-dark (unfortunately I don't have experience in how exactly to do this; I just know that it can be done) and have your PHP catch $_GET['style'].
Related
I want to mask some of the subdirectories and pages for my website. For example:
I want to change
www.example.com/blog.php?post=post1
to
www.example.com/blog
or something similar to that. I have seen examples about redirecting and such but that doesn't seem to work for what I want and I would like to stay away from iframes if possible. I just want the address bar to not reflect my internal directory structure and page names. I want it to keep showing /blog while they are moving from post to post. Thanks.
P.S. I am not using wordpress or any other CMS or blogging system.
You can use apache mod_rewrite for that.
Mod Rewrite Generator
And if You don't want to have the same url on blog-post/article change, but to display different content, all I can think of this moment is by using either POST method or browser cookies, but, that would require a lot of page reloads, and it simply is not recommended for wide use. If You are building per_se (one person only) panel or similar, than url doesn't matter that much, but, speaking of blog..
It is quite reasonable to hide .php extension or url query index/key, but not what You would like to accomplish.
Like I said, it is possible, but Luke .. don't do that.
Blog should be bookmarkable on each and every #stop, and that happens just because of unique urls and hash values. Without these two, no hyperlinking possible *(not to mention seo penals and flaws + dozen of other unwanted obstacles, page caching for instance).
I am wondering if this is possible with PHP, or if not with ASP since it's relatively similar and I could pick it up quickly. Let's say I have a text input for a user to search a database; as an alternative to using the text field I want a user to be able to go to 'www.examplesite.com/SEARCHTERM'. Is this possible? I've seen it done, but I can't figure out how. Thanks!
You might have to look in to url rewriting based on the server you use.
URL Rewritting
This can be done:
1) Using $_GET
www.examplesite.com/?SEARCH=SerachTermHere
In the page you can get the search variable with $_GET['SEARCH']
2) Using URL Rewritting
Yes that's easily possible. For example if you have apache server then you can enable mod rewrite and write one rule to redirect all such requests to your script in a variable and it will then handle accordingly
It is possible, you have two options.
Using URL Rewritting in your server configuration.
Using $_GET global. Everything in URL after your actual page address is available through $_GET.
This goes a bit beyond your question but might prove to be very useful. Even though it is a framework, you might want to look at Symfony 2 routing for ideas how to implement it. Specifically at "Under The Hood" section. You can even explore their routing code on github. Applications made in it have exactly the form you are searching for (content displaying based on $_GET data).
I have a site complete with CMS etc all working under one domain name. It turns out for legal reasons one page on this site has to sit on a different domain name. The page is hooked into the same CMS as the rest of the site (built using codeigniter). I don't want to have to do another installation just for this page.
Is there any simple way to display just this page under a different domain name without taking it out of the current application?
Thanks a lot
You should look at either (in order):
an include()with correct php.ini configuration
a file_get_content() and printing the variable into your page
an <iframe src="yoururl"> wich would be the easy peasy but unsafe way
using the on-purprose curllibrary
using fopen() wich theorically allows distant files to be opened, but based on my experience, it's not that reliable
Look at this site, it seems rather exhaustive regarding your problem.
Try including the file
<?php include 'http://www.domain.com/url/to/file/page.html' ?>
I think what you need here is a symlink, which is something I don't know too much about. My understanding is that the path displayed to the user does not in fact have to have anything to do with where the file is actually stored, meaning you can set this up to have a completely different URL while keeping it as part of your original application.
A simpler thing is doing a redirect...it's one line of code in your .htaccess file and you're good to go.
include is a possible solution depending on the format of the remote page (ie, this won't work very well if the remote page has a full DOM structure, and you're trying to include the remote page within the DOM structure of your CMS page), however more information about that remote page would be needed to help determine if include() alone would be enough.
Regardless, if include() does, work, you must make sure allow_url_include in php.ini is enabled, as by default script execution will terminate when encoutering a remote URL include statement.
So, currently I'm organizing my blog based on filename: To create a post I enter the name of the file. As opposed to storing the post in the database, I store them in PHP files. So each time I create a post, A new row in the table is created with the filename and a unique ID. To reference the post (e.g. for comments) I get the name of the current file, then search the entries table for a matching file name. The post ID of the comment matches the ID of that post.
Obviously this isn't the standard way of organizing a blog, but I do it this way for a few reasons:
Clean URL's (even cleaner than mod_rewrite can provide from what I've read)
I always have a hard copy of the post on my machine
Easier to remember the URL of a specific post (kind of a part of clean URL's)
Now I know that the standard way would be storing each post in the database. I know how to do this, but the clean URL's is the main problem. So now to my questions:
Is there anything WRONG with the way I'm doing it now, or could any problems arise from it in the future?
Can the same level of clean URL's that I can get now be achieved with mod_rewrite? If so, links are appreciated
I will be hosting this on a web host. Do only certain web-hosts provide access to the necessary files for mod_rewrite, or is it generally standard on all web-hosts?
Thanks so much guys!
P.S. To be clear, I don't plan on using a blogging engine.
As cletus said, this is similar to Movable Type. There's nothing inherently wrong with storing your data in files.
One thing that comes to mind is: how much are you storing in the files? Just the post content, or does each PHP file contain a copy of the entire design of the page as opposed to using a base template? How difficult would it be to change the design later on? This may or may not be a problem.
What exactly are you looking for in terms of clean URLs? Rewrite rules are quite powerful and flexible. By using mod_rewrite in conjunction with a main PHP file that answers all requests, you can pretty much have any URL format you want, including user-friendly URLs without obscure ID numbers or even file extensions.
Edit:
Here is how it would work with mod_rewrite and a main PHP file that processes requests:
Web server passes all requests (e.g., /my-post-title) to, say, index.php
index.php parses the request path ("my-post-title")
Look up "my-post-title" in the database's "slug" or "friendly name" (whatever you want to call it) column and locates the appropriate row that way
Retrieve the post from the database
Apply a template to the post data
Return the completed page to the client
This is essentially how systems like Drupal and WordPress work.
Also, regarding how Movable Type works, it's been a while since I've used it so I might be wrong, but I believe it stores all posts in the database. When you hit the publish button, it generates plain HTML files by pulling post data from the database and inserting it into a template. This is incredibly efficient when your site is under heavy load - there are no scripts running when a visitor opens up your website, and the server can keep up with heavy visitation when it only needs to serve up static files.
So obviously you've got a lot of options when figuring out how your solution should work. The one you proposed sounds fine, though you might want to give careful consideration to how you'll maintain a large number of posts in individual files, particularly if you want to change the design of the entire site later on. You might want to consider a templating engine like Smarty, and just store post data (no layout tags) in your individual files, for instance. Or just use some basic include() statements in your post files to suck in headers, footers, nav menus, etc.
What you're describing is kind of like how Movable Type works. The issues you'll need to cover are:
Syndication: RSS/Atom;
Sitemap: for Google;
Commenting; and
Tagging and filtering content.
It's not unreasonable not to use a database. If I were to do that I'd be using a templating engine like Smarty that does a better job of caching the results than PHP will out of the box.
For example, I'd like to have my registration, about and contact pages resolve to different content, but via hash tags:
three links one each to the registration, contact and about page -
www.site.com/index.php#about
www.site.com/index.php#registration
www.site.com/index.php#contact
Is there a way using Javascript or PHP to resolve these pages to the separated content?
The hash is not sent to the server, so you can only do it in Javascript.
Check the value of location.hash.
There's no server-side way to do it. You could work with AJAX, but this will break the site for non-javascript users. The best way would probably be to have server-side content URLs (index.php?page=<page_id>) and rewrite these locally with JavaScript (to #<page_id>) and handle the content loading with AJAX then. That way you can have your hash-URLs for JS-enabled devices and everybody else can still use the site.
It does however require a bit of redundance because you need to provide the same content twice, once for inclusion via AJAX and once with the proper layout and everything via PHP.
If you just want hash URLs for aesthetic reasons, but don't want to rely on JS, you're out of luck. The semantics of URLs are against you: fragment IDs shouldn't really affect the content the URL is referring to, merely the fragment within that content. AJAX URLs are changing those semantics, but there's no good reason to do that if you don't have to.
I suppose you probably have a good reason, but can I ask, why would you do this? It breaks the widely understood standard of how hashs in URLs are supposed to work, and its just begging for trouble for interoperability with other clients, down the road.
You can use PHP's Global $_REQUEST variables to grab the requested URL and parse out the hashtag...