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11.

Adding a very Simple Layout

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Adding a very Simple Layout

Ok, let’s improve one more thing by giving contact.php the same HTML layout as our homepage. To do this, just isolate the header and footer into their own files, say layout/header.php and layout/footer.php. Move all of the HTML from the top of the index page into header and the stuff from the bottom into footer:

<!-- layout/header.php -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>...</head>
<body>
<!-- header code here... -->
<!-- layout/footer.php -->
<footer>...</footer>
</body>
</html>

Require the header near the top of each page and the footer after our page-specific code:

<?php
    // index.php
    // ... the big PHP code block at the top
?>
<?php require 'layout/header.php'; ?>

<!-- all of the HTML and PHP code from the middle  ...-->

<?php require 'layout/footer.php'; ?>

Note

Repeat the same thing in the contact.php file.

And just like that, our two pages are sharing the layout!

You’re going Far!

Woh! You just learned a ton: coming from the basics of PHP to using arrays, functions, foreach loops, complex if statements, true/false boolean values, user-defined functions, require statements and more. We also got your system setup so that you can develop and try your own code locally.

So congratulations, but keep going! There’s so much more that we need to cover, like how to submit a form, talk to a database, and use query parameters. And to be serious developers, we also need to organize our project better. As nice as the functions.php, header.php, and footer.php files are, real developers organize things in more sophisticated ways. But keep working and we’ll get there!

See ya next time!