Using PHP conditional statements to switch HTML content on different pages

Question

I'm a front-end developer who is somewhat familiar with but rarely uses PHP. I'm working on a personal project where I'm mostly just using includes to link PHP files together. Here is my overall basic page structure:

<?php include('header.php'); ?>
<?php include('pagetitle.php'); ?>

Page content goes here.

<?php include('footer.php'); ?>

On pagetitle.php, I have an <h1>,<h2> and background image relating to which page you're on.

My question is, how do I use conditional statements to put all the page titles/subheadings on pagetitle.php and have them switch depending on what page you're on? So for example, I want

<div id="about">
<h1>About</h1>
<h2>About page subheading</h2>
</div>

to show up on about.php, and

<div id="contact">
<h1>Contact Me</h1>
<h2>Contact page subheading</h2>
</div>

to show up on contact.php, etc. etc. ...but only using pagetitle.php on those pages.

The site isn't huge. It would have no more than 10 pages. Also, I do realize I can just use that page title segment on the respective page, but if possible, I want to try this out.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would do something like this (not tested, but should work with few, if any, changes.)
(Everyone says that, right? :D):

<?php
    /*
    create a map that contains the information for each page.
    the name of each page maps to an array containing the
    (div id, heading 1, & subheading for that page).
    */
    $pageinfo = array(
        "about.php" => array ("about", "About", "About Page Subheading"),
        "contact.php" => array ("contact", "Contact Me", "Contact Page Subheading"),
        );

    function printinfo($pagename) {
        /*
        This function will print the info for the current page.
        */

        global $pageinfo;

        $pagename = basename($pagename);

        #make sure we have info for this page
        if (!array_key_exists($pagename, $pageinfo) {
            echo "<p><b>You did not supply info for page $pagename</b></p>";
            return;
            }

        #we do have info ... continue
        $info = $pageinfo[$pagename];

        #let's print the div (with its custom id),
        echo "<div id='" . $info[0] . "'>\n";

        #print the headings
        echo "<h1>" . $info[1] . "</h1>\n";
        echo "<h2>" . $info[2] . "</h2>\n";

        #close the div
        echo "</div>\n";
        }
    ?>

Then in each page where you wanted your div, you would place this code:

printinfo($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);

Other:

• This way is more flexible than the other ways, at the sacrifice of no conditional statements. (You specifically requested a solution that had conditional statements; however, in the interest of flexibility & maintainability, this example does not use switch statements or if statements.)

• Because there are no conditional statements, there is less code to maintain. Granted, you have to setup the array with the information, but if you decided to change the <h2> to an <h3>, you would have to make the change at only one location, etc.