Building a Dynamic/Static Toolbar

[TheFilmGod]

I'm designing a website where I want to make the left toolbar dynamic/static. The toolbar is complicated. It has two panels that be toggled through by two tabs at the top. Click one to show it and hide the other.

 

Things get more complicated though. users will be able to maximize/minimize and move the elements (<li>) around within each panel.

 

That can all be easily done with some fancy pantsy jquery/css, but what I truly would like to make it dynamic throughout the ENTIRE website using php.

 

Some pages would want to keep the toolbar static. Content doesn't change. Other pages might have the "login" panel and I need php to automatically detect whether it should give it the default/page current/... etc.

 

So far I figured this out...

 

In the php realm I would do something like:

 

build_toolbar('right') or build_toolbar('left') to build the toolbar with either the left or right side panel open. Pretty easy... but how would I go around detecting whether the page has page-specific elements, which order of elements I need to build things, and let the elements dynamically interact with the php pages. For example, if someone is registering, I want the side panel to show there step 1/3... but I don't want to copy and paste use the same code multiple times in three different php files but just one. For easy editting...

 

Hope that makes. Today my brain got numb so I just procrastinated and designed some other pages.

 

Thanks!