Mick Redman: anchor

Friday, 17 June 2011

Using PHP to create a dynamic page navigation based on filenames

Here is the problem. You create a bunch of pages. You want to highlight the current page within the navigation. You don't want to manually change the navigation elements to each page.

See demo.

In the example below I create an associative array which contains two elements:

The name of the page which the navigation points to.
The name which should appear in the navigation.

I then grab the filename of the of the current page in the browser.
I then traverse the associative array, each time comparing the filename against the current file shown in the browser, each time creating an anchor using the values.

If array filename and current page filename are the same, then I add a CSS ID to the anchor tag.

You will need to write a little CSS to highlight the current page anchor such as:

nav a#activeMenuItem
{
background:#EEEEEE;
}

But other than that, it works like a charm. Have fun!

<nav>
<?php
$navArray = array('index.php'=>'home', 'services.php'=>'services','portfolio.php'=>'portfolio','contact.php'=>'contact');
$fileName = substr(strrchr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'],47),1);
foreach($navArray as $fname => $linktitle)
{
echo '<a href="'.$fname.'"';
if($fname==$fileName)
{
echo ' id="activeMenuItem"';
}
echo '>'.$linktitle.'</a>';
}
?>
</nav>

Tuesday, 12 October 2010

Put external web content into your page using jQuery and PHP

I looked into using the jQuery .load and .get methods to do this, but it only seemed to work with content on my server. I knew that PHP had a really good function called file_get_contents, so I thought, I'll use that, but jQuery is still good for putting the contents into your page. Here is an example of how they work together to achieve the goal.

See demo.

First the HTML file :

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=”en”>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>jQuery Loading External Content</title>
<style type="text/css">
body
{
font-family:Sans-serif;
}
#container
{
background:#FF0000;
color:#FFFFFF;
width:400px;
height:400px;
}
</style>
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
google.load("jquery", "1");
google.load("jqueryui", "1");
</script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function()
{
   $('a').click(function()
   {
   $.post("getTheContent.php",
   {
theAddress:$(this).attr('url')
   }, function(data)
   {
/* This is where you would manipulate the data before it is pushed into the div */
$('#container').html(data);
console.log(data);
   });
   return false;
   });
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<a url="http://htmldog.com/examples/textalign.html">first</a>
<a url="http://htmldog.com/examples/headings1.html">second</a>
<a url="http://htmldog.com/examples/superscript.html">third</a>
<a url="http://htmldog.com/examples/case.html">fourth</a>
<div id="container">

</div>
</body>
</html>

Now, the PHP file called getTheContent.php :

<?php
   echo file_get_contents($_POST["theAddress"]);
?>

You can see that I am posting the value of the url descriptor from the anchor tag to the PHP file using jQuery. Then I echo the results back into jQuery and push it into the div.