I have been developing my own PHP MVC framework. Now I have seen different frameworks implementing different extensions for the View files. I am using simply php extension for my view files.
Now is there anything wrong if i use php extension.
Are there any merits or de-merits of it?
Why use other extension such as:
phtml
etc
If you're talking about using these extensions in public facing URLs, then I would say don't use either:
File name extension. This is a very
common one. "cgi", even ".html" is
something which will change. You may
not be using HTML for that page in 20
years time, but you might want today's
links to it to still be valid. The
canonical way of making links to the
W3C site doesn't use the extension.
(Taken from W3C URL style guide)
You can achieve this with mod_rewrite, for example.
However, if you're talking about how to name your files in the filesystem, it's largely a matter of taste. I think both the extensions you suggested (phtml and php) make sense, the main thing is being consistent.
Edit: Also, since you said this is for a framework, you should consider choosing a non-standard extension may require extra webserver configuration. For example, to support both .phtml and .php in Apache:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .phtml .php
There's nothing wrong with using PHP extension if the code inside is valid PHP. It's nice to indicate somehow that a file is a view script. That's why some use .phtml. But I guess, you put them in a separate place-for-views anyway, right?
A benefit of .phtml is that it's obvious what kind of file it is when displayed in a "Jump to file" list. It's a feature of my IDE I use a lot: just typing a part of any file name in a project and picking the one to jump to.
It really doesn't matter what you use and as far as Apache goes its exactly the same if you are directly including the files.
Some use .tpl, some use .php and some use .phtml. Just pick the one you like the look of most.
Related
So I have a website with more than 10 pages. Now I want to export the head section, the header and the footer to other files, in order to facilitate further editing of any of those section, without having to go through every single page. Is it possible to make a header.html and have the other html files import the code from the separate file?
What you're describing is an "include" and here's how to do it with PHP. I recommend using a server side language like PHP to do the include because it will definitely be indexed by Google and you don't need to worry that the user has javascript disabled or poorly supported.
First of all, you won't be able to do this unless your webpages are either saved as PHP (with .php extension) or your HTML pages (.html extension) are being parsed by PHP. Obviously you'll also need PHP running on your server.
Take the chunks you want to "include" and save them into their own files (header.php, footer.php, etc.). Put them in their own folder under your assets area (such as a directory called includes or inc). Then, in your web pages, use PHP to include those files:
<?php include_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/include/header.php') ?>
I like to use the $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable so I don't need to remember the relative path to the include directory. Use that include line exactly where you would place the original header html.
If you want to keep your files as HTML but have them parsed as PHP, you'll need to make sure your server is parsing HTML files as PHP. You can direct the server to do this in the .htaccess (assuming Apache) where you'll need a line like this:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html
This line will be different for different host environments, so you may need to tweak that.
You could move your header and associated files to an html file and just call jQuery load to bring it in.
USAGE
http://api.jquery.com/load/
You can also use PHP to do a php include_once of your header.php file. This is similar to what wordpress does!
USAGE
http://php.net/manual/en/function.include-once.php
Good luck and let me know if theres other questions!
Yes, your problem is a general problem of preventing code duplication. As usual with general problems this problem was addressed a lot with a lot of different approaches over the years.
And there are more possible solutions, it would be a very hard task just to list all the possible solutions, so my answer will be very vague.
You can use the object tag to reuse your structure
You can load it with a client-side language, like Javascript (or using its very popular library, called jQuery)
Finally, you can generate your HTML using a server-side language
You can't do this with CSS. You can call those HTML contents from separated files using Ajax (it's pretty simple with jQuery) or you can directly include the files using PHP.
I often see examples in PHP that include.inc files. What is the meaning of .inc? What it is used for? What are the disadvantages and advantages of using it?
It has no meaning, it is just a file extension. It is some people's convention to name files with a .inc extension if that file is designed to be included by other PHP files, but it is only convention.
It does have a possible disadvantage which is that servers normally are not configured to parse .inc files as php, so if the file sits in your web root and your server is configured in the default way, a user could view your php source code in the .inc file by visiting the URL directly.
Its only possible advantage is that it is easy to identify which files are used as includes. Although simply giving them a .php extension and placing them in an includes folder has the same effect without the disadvantage mentioned above.
If you are concerned about the file's content being served rather than its output. You can use a double extension like: file.inc.php. It then serves the same purpose of helpfulness and maintainability.
I normally have 2 php files for each page on my site:
One named welcome.php in the root folder, containing all of the HTML markup.
And another named welcome.inc.php in the inc folder, containing all PHP functions specific to the welcome.php page.
EDIT: Another benefit of using the double extention .inc.php would be that any IDE can still recognise the file as PHP code.
Generally means that its a file that needs to be included and does not make standalone script in itself.
This is a convention not a programming technique.
Although if your web server is not configured properly it could expose files with extensions like .inc.
It's just a way for the developer to be able to easily identify files which are meant to be used as includes. It's a popular convention. It does not have any special meaning to PHP, and won't change the behaviour of PHP or the script itself.
This is a convention that programmer usually use to identify different file names for include files. So that if the other developers is working on their code, he can easily identify why this file is there and what is purpose of this file by just seeing the name of the file.
Just to add. Another disadvantage would be, .inc files are not recognized by IDE thus, you could not take advantage of auto-complete or code prediction features.
In my opinion, these were used as a way to quickly find include files when developing. Really these have been made obsolete with conventions and framework designs.
Note that
You can configure Apache so that all files With .inc extension are forbidden to be retrieved by visiting URL directly.
see link:https://serverfault.com/questions/22577/how-to-deny-the-web-access-to-some-files
Does anybody know of a software program that will convert a website built with PHP, JSON and jquery into a mainly HTML format. We need to do a conversion for SEO purposes and don't want to have to rewrite the whole site.
HTML is a language used for markup, PHP is an object oriented functional language. You cannot convert one to the other, I'm sorry.
If you're trying to make sure that you have nothing but .HTML extensions on your public URLs for SEO purposes:
Someone's selling you a line of BS.
You need access to your server configuration.
You don't have to convert anything but your links.
The .PHP extension is the default file extension configured to be sent from Apache to the PHP engine for parsing. You can change what file extension gets parsed in your configuration file.
http://encodable.com/parse_html_files_as_php/
This will allow you to keep .HTM files static and have .HTML files parsed as if they were .PHP files.
Try this: http://www.httrack.com/
It will only return a static HTML site. But it might be a good base for you.
Since the only thing which really knows what type of file you're using is the server itself, it does not really matter what you're using on the back end. Most search engines are smart enough to know that so they don't really care so much. Now, people might care. People might say, "Hm, well, this is .html, that means that this person must have a flat file which is constantly being updated," but I doubt it.
If you're really concerned about having a .html extension, then you can fake it by using htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1.php [L]
If that is placed in a .htaccess file at the root of your site, it will redirect all requests which end with .html to a corresponding page with .php. It will do that transparently both to the user and to the crawlers.
Of course, every link on your site will need to convert from linking to .php, but it will replace the impossible task of using only .html files with the annoying task of replacing all of your .php links.
As to removing JavaScript, well, you could do that, or you could design your site in such a way that it still uses AJAX but it works with the search engines instead of against them. The biggest trick is to make sure that your site can work with as little AJAX as possible and then use AJAX to supplement. We've come a long way from requiring that all websites work in lynx, but it is still good practice to make sure that they are still sane without the benefit of JS/CSS.
Besides, search engines are getting smarter. Google has been working to read AJAX intelligently since 2009. But even if they weren't, there are plenty of articles out there on using AJAX without hurting SEO.
There is no need to nerf your site because of SEO -- You can have your AJAX and SEO too.
This is hard to accomplish if there is a lot of dynamic data. For a simple website you can just cache every page and make that your new website. I am not sure how useful that would be. For example if you have forms or other user input fields then things will just not work. In any case this is how you do it using wget.
$ wget -m http://www.example.com/
More reading here.
I'm trying to add some of my own PHP to a nearly-unreadable template file on a forum system. I know it all works perfectly as far as the server config, etc. goes, but PHP simply doesn't parse on this page. JS works fine. Any ideas? It's a simple .html page.
Try adding this to your .htaccess (or creating a new one in the appropriate directory):
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html
Is it possible that the template file is being read into a variable rather than being included or required? Eg. it's loaded using file_get_contents or something similar?
If this is the case you may need to eval() the template code after it has been loaded as file_get_contents does not parse php code, it just loads the text as it is into a variable. It's a very ugly solution but it may work for you. Please be careful if you do this as it does open up a whole can of security issue worms.
A lot of template systems use their own coding syntax. If this is the case it will not be possible to include PHP code in your template without opening up a lot of security holes.
Try to learn the specific templating language used, or find out where you should put the code without changing the template file (there may be a controller or plugin system built for such stuff).
Your page has to be a .php page.
Is there any problem with running HTML as PHP via .htaccess? such as security or best practices etc. was doing this to make URLs cleaner.
## run the following file types as php
Addhandler application/x-httpd-php .html .htm .rss .xml
Well ideally id like to have my URLs like
localhost/blog/posts/view.php?id=64
to be
localhost/projects/bittyPHP/bittyphp/posts/view/id-64
But having trouble accomplishing that without routing everything to one file and having PHP run determine the paths. I guess this is my real question
I would use mod rewrite.
Probably you do not need to run all html files as PHP, and if you have short_tags enabled "<?" in XML will give you trouble.
Keep in mind that you will run each and every of those files through the PHP handler then. If there is no PHP inside the files, the parser will still inspect them to see if there is any PHP in it. This adds some overhead, but it is likely neglectable in most setups.
Main issue I would say is performance. If you have a significant number of plain HTML files then you're creating unnecessary overhead by always running them through the PHP interpretter.
Best practice is not to do this, but use "friendly" URLS like mysite.com/item/123 and use mod_rewrite to convert them to mysite.com/displayitem.php?id=123 internally
Like many people have already stated, mod_rewrite is the best solution for accomplishing friendly URLs.
Sitepoint has a decent guide to getting started with mod_rewrite.