Originally posted by AmyDaynes
So am I right in thinking you can mix different scripting languages in the same page?
Would it be sort of like this?
<html>
html stuff
</html>
<php>
php stuff
</php>
<html>
html stuff
</html>
<css>
css stuff
</css>
By the way, I know my php and css tags are wrong! I've never even seen a php or css script! Lol.
Go ahead and try this out here:
We're going to create 3 different files.
File One - HTML: Main Page - Save As: index.php
------------------------------------------------------------
*NOTES*: Saving the file as .PHP allows us to use PHP Code within the document. This does not mean the entire document must be PHP. You can save a file as .php and use nothing but HTML if you wish.
<html>
<head>
<title>Mikey you rock!</title>
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<?php include('header.php'); ?><br />
<br />
Content!
<br />
<br />
</body>
</html>
Thad one is pretty straight forward for the most part with HTML. We do have our first PHP statement in it though, so let's examine that a little bit.
The PHP code is included between two tags (as you mentioned you knew yours were wrong). These tags are:
<?php
and
?>
*NOTE*: You can use simply <? instead of <?php but it is not reccomended as some webservers may not recognize it.
Now we understand how to define our PHP code, lets look at the actual code a bit more in depth.
include('header.php');
This is a very simple piece of code. We are telling the webserver to "include" the file header.php.
The include function without the target item to include would look like this:
include()
We enclose the item we are including in quotes. You can use either:
' or "
it is more a matter of preferance than anything else. This allows the server to understand exactly what file to include. You could do something like this:
include("/inc/layout/header.php")
if you wanted to. Now the last part is the semicolon. Every line of PHP code must be ended with a semicolon. PHP does not read it's code line by line, but instead it reads it until it finds a semicolon, then processes that text as one line of code.
For example try this in your spare time.
Make a file called test.php and put this inside of it, then view it on a webbrowser:
<?php
echo(
"
T
h
i
s
i
s
c
o
o
l
"
)
;
?>
So with that we understand that simple PHP statement. Now that we have that we are going to create our header.php file.
File Two - HTML: Header File - Save As: header.php
------------------------------------------------------------
*NOTES*: This file is an example of a header that we would want to look the same on every page of our website. By using this in a PHP include, we can have hundreds of pages, but only one header.php file. That means if we need to chnage how the header looks, we can change the one file instead of having to update all 1525 individual pages.
<br /><span class="header">This is my header!</span><br />
Now that wasn't too hard to do was it? Not at all! You might notice something in that file that you aren't too familiar with and that is the class statement. Well I had to slip that one in on you! That is the start of CSS! A span is a very simple way of setting how a block of text looks. Everythign between the span will be formatted according to the "class" we are going to create in the next step!
File Three - CSS: Stylesheet - Save As: style.css
------------------------------------------------------------
.header {color: #5E88A8; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold;}
This file may look a bit crazy at first but it is not hard to understand when you get down to it.
.header is the name of our class
All the details in the class are in-between the curly brackets {}
The first directive is the color of the text, in this case:
#5E88A8
We preface that with a : to show the start of that information
and we end it with a semicolon (much like PHP).
Next is the font used. We list a few here in case the user does not have the first one in the list. If they don't have the first one it will work it's way through until it finds one they do have.
The next statement says that the font size should be 16
The final statement says to make the font bold.
Now that you have all three files upload them to a PHP enabled webserver and go to the index.php file!
If you have any questions or if I messed something up feel free to post, PM, or E-mail me!
