Simple PHP Website Templates

So you have a basic HTML site with 100 pages, what happens when you want to change the title tag? Well, if you aren’t using PHP includes, you will have to update each file. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make the change to one file and it would update every page? That is what we will accomplish with our basic PHP template tutorial.

This tutorial will require a server that can handle PHP code. If you would like to set one up on your computer, check out Mike’s “Installing WAMP tutorial”.

First, if you don’t have a website that you would like to break up into a template, you can use the sample 2 column layout below from 456bereastreet.com

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Column 1

456 Berea Street Home | Simple 2 column CSS layout | Developing with web standards index

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Nulla a lacus. Nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Fusce pulvinar lobortis purus. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec semper ipsum et urna. Ut consequat neque vitae felis. Suspendisse dapibus, magna quis pulvinar laoreet, dolor neque lacinia arcu, et luctus mi erat vestibulum sem. Mauris faucibus iaculis lacus. Aliquam nec ante in quam sollicitudin congue. Quisque congue egestas elit. Quisque viverra. Donec feugiat elementum est. Etiam vel lorem.

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Maecenas eu velit nec magna venenatis consequat. In neque. Vivamus pellentesque, lacus eu aliquet semper, lorem metus rhoncus metus, a ornare orci ante a diam. Nunc sem nisl, aliquet quis, elementum nec, imperdiet in, wisi. Proin in lorem. Etiam molestie diam eget ante. Morbi quis tortor id lacus mollis venenatis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam vel orci sit amet tellus mollis eleifend. Donec urna diam, viverra eget, ultricies gravida, ultrices eu, erat. Proin vel arcu. Sed diam. Cras hendrerit arcu sed augue. Sed justo felis, luctus a, accumsan in, tincidunt facilisis, libero. Phasellus eu eros.

We are going to break the page up into individual files, and then use PHP includes to join them again. Here is a break down of how the files will be separated.

The first step is to is to create a new PHP file. This file will be for the header, so I will name it header.php (you could also name these header.inc if you would like). We will cut all of the code from the beginning HTML tag all the way down to the end of the header section and paste it in this file. The file should look like this:

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Next we will cut the code for the top menu and paste it into a file called top-menu.php

And the last part is to cut from the div id=”sidebar” to the end of the page and paste it in sidebar.php. You could also separate the footer into its own file, but for the is example I will include it into the sidebar.

Now if you cut all of those lines, it should leave you with the following code in your original file:

Column 1

456 Berea Street Home | Simple 2 column CSS layout | Developing with web standards index

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So now we have all of the code broken down into include files. How do we put them all back together?

Create a file called template.php, we will use this as the template to build each content page. Now we just have to include the pages we just created. When using include, the web server will render the code from the included pages before the browser interprets it. You will see later that the source code will be identical if viewed in the browser.

This is what your template.php file should look like:

Column 1

456 Berea Street Home | Simple 2 column CSS layout | Developing with web standards index

Consectetuer adipiscing elit

Then when creating a new file, simple use the template and change the content in the main div to the new content. When you want to add a link to that page you can add it in sidebar.php or top-menu.php

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8 Comments

8 Responses to 'Simple PHP Website Templates'

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Noob needs help with page design. - WickedFire - Affiliate Marketing Forum - Internet Marketing Webmaster SEO Forum said,

on August 25th, 2008 at 1:59 pm

[...] Simple PHP Website Templates – Team Tutorials __________________ Tutorials on Photoshop, HTML, CSS, PHP and more. [...]
multimodefibercable said,

on October 27th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

really informative great blog man you people just rock…
webdesign romania said,

on December 1st, 2008 at 11:13 pm

So now we have all of the code broken down into include files. How do we put them all back together?
John Ward said,

on December 2nd, 2008 at 11:28 am

By including them with php as you will see in the last step.
Frank said,

on February 23rd, 2009 at 9:28 pm

I understand it up to a point, but how do i create the links to internal site in top menu, can you give example. Thanks
jon said,

on March 12th, 2009 at 7:47 am

This is exactly what I need, thanks!!

However, I have a slight problem. When saving the template.php it works fine, but when I save it in a subfolder none of my images from my header.php file show up, and yes I have changed to path ../header.php – The header does show up but for some reason the images appear as blacks.

I am new to php so please forgive me if I’m being an idiot!

Many thanks
John Ward said,

on March 12th, 2009 at 8:49 am

@frank
using html…the ‘a’ tag.

@jon
jon, the relative path should work if you are in a folder withing the folder your include files are in. You could also try an absolute path ie:

include(’http://yoursite.com/templatedir/header.php’);

Can you use relative paths for other things, such as linking to an image in the directory above the current?
anindya chatterjee said,

on May 2nd, 2009 at 5:01 am

It is a good conception .I have tried it in my site. Thanks.