How to display same header and footer on different pages? - php

Question

I have header.php and footer.php files which I include in all of my pages. A sample page looks like this -
<?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/header.php');?>
<div id="content">
...
</div> <!-- content -->
<?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/footer.php') ?>
Although this works well on the server, but when I test pages locally [ xampp on Windows 7 ], I get the following error message instead of the header, similarly for the footer -
Warning: include(C:/xampp/htdocs/header.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:\xampp\htdocs\f\index.php on line 1
Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening 'C:/xampp/htdocs/header.php' for inclusion (include_path='.;C:\xampp\php\PEAR') in C:\xampp\htdocs\f\index.php on line 1
This makes testing very tedious as I have to upload to the server for every minor change.
Also, I dug around the WP code, and it uses a get-header() to display the header.php file. I could not completely understand the function. My site does not use WP.
What is the correct way for including header and footer files?

Answer 1

the correct way to include any file is the include() or require() function. Wordpress uses a get_header() function because the header is more then just 1 file, so they created a function for outputting it.
The problem you have seems to be a problem with the $_SERVER variable. It has been quite a long time since I've worked with PHP, but what I would advise you to do is just use relative paths. For example, if the header.php and footer.php files are in the same directory as your index.php, you can just do:
<?php include("header.php');?>
<div id="content">
...
</div> <!-- content -->
<?php include('footer.php') ?>

Answer 2

Simple and useful way (I use this in my all projects):
// find Base path
define( 'BASE_PATH', dirname(__FILE__) );
// include files
include BASE_PATH . '/header.php';
include BASE_PATH . '/footer.php';

Answer 3

It seems that $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] is pointing to C:\xampp\htdocs, while your scripts are at C:\xampp\htdocs\f\, check the value of $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] on your local environment.
edit:
<?php
$rootDir = "";
if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],'localhost')===FALSE)
{
//On Production
$rootDir = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
}
else
{
//On Dev server
$rootDir = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/f';
}
<?php include($rootDir.'/header.php');?>
<div id="content">
...
</div> <!-- content -->
<?php include($rootDir.'/footer.php') ?>
?>