Extending PHPHP

Whenever you need to specify a feature that appears on all pages - be it some text, or variable text, a popup window, maybe a "feedback" form, a file upload window: specify it in your inc.php file and you can use it everywhere.

Another example: I want a box containing "This page is probably out of date" to be showed whenever the page being viewed is older than six months. This is easy - you don't have to change your pages at all (because the decision whether to show this box does not depend on the page content, only the file age).

Here's one way to do it: Put the code in a function in inc.php and call it in the files you need it to be called, right after print $p->kopf(); call, like print $p->outofdate();. Here, I even included a default text (so that you can change it for a couple pages but leave the default for most).

<php
    include "inc_page.php"
    class mypage extends page {
	...
    
	var $vars = ..... 


	function outofdate($text="NB: This site is out of date. Things might have changed.") {
	    return "<div style='padding:1mm; font-size:12px; 
	    	font-weight:bold; text-align:center; position:fixed; 
		top:2mm; border:2px solid red; color:#ff0000; 
		background-color:#ffeeee; width:60mm; left:auto; right:2mm;'>
			$text
		</div>";
	}

    }
?>

This feature has been used (in a similar way) in some of my pages on this site. Look at Linux am ASG for example. Actually, except for the fact that it automagically appears on every page (in my case), it's just plain HTML and CSS (cascading style sheet) code.

More Features

There are some more features in the code (which I haven't documented yet because they aren't finished yet or break compatability with older versions of PHPHP). If you want to have a look, go ahead - and tell me what you did ;-)

Have Fun with PHPHP! I hope it saves you as much work as it did me.