Advice on creating "current item highlighted" menu

[Wuhtzu]

Hey

 

I'm building a small site which consist of a few menu items each "linked" to individual scripts like this:

 

Home -> index.php

T-Shirts -> tshirts.php

Contact -> contact.php

(Just to mention a few of them)

 

With mod_rewrite the URLs look like this:

 

mysite.com -> mysite.com/some/other/location/index.php

mysite.com/tshirts -> mysite.com/some/other/location/tshirts.php

mysite.com/contact -> mysite.com/some/other/location/contact.php

 

What I would like some advice on is the neatest / smartest way to create a menu which have "current category/menu item" highlighted... So when you are viewing mysite.com/tshirts the T-Shirt menu item is highlighted.

 

How should I use PHP to determine which item to highlight in this case?

 

If the site was build around a single file index.php which took a $_GET parameter page it would be simple since you would simply base your highlighting on $_GET['page'] but I'm not quite sure how I should do this...

 

Please give me your thoughts

 

 

Thanks alot

Wuhtzu

[Wes1890]

This is what i would do:

 

put each link in an array

 

<?php
$links = array (
'home'  =>  'index.php',
'other'  =>  'index.php?page=other'
);
?>

 

Do that for each page, then run a for loop where you want the links to be

 

<?php
while ( list($title,$url) = each($links) )
{
  if ($_GET['page'] == $title) // if its the current page, make it non-clickable
  {
    echo "{$title}<br />";
  }
  else // otherwise, make it clickable
  {
    echo "<a href={$url}>{$title}</a><br />";
  }
}
?>

[Wuhtzu]

That is exactly what I would do _if_ the site was build around index.php which took page as a get parameter, but as I said that is not the case

[Wes1890]

^ then do this

 

<?php
// Get the current script name. it will be stored in $pfile
// example.. yoursite.com/moneybaby.php would output "moneybaby.php"
//
$file = $_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"];
$break = Explode('/', $file);
$pfile = $break[count($break) - 1];


while ( list($title,$url) = each($links) )
{
  if ($_GET['page'] == $pfile) // if its the current page, make it non-clickable
  {
    echo "{$title}<br />";
  }
  else // otherwise, make it clickable
  {
    echo "<a href={$url}>{$title}</a><br />";
  }
}
?>

[Wuhtzu]

Yup that is definitely an option... you don't think it's "not neat" to use the script name?

[Wes1890]

^ I've always done that.. same exact thing, works like a charm

 

Although you could go through and set a pagename variable in each .php page you have. But thats no fun, make the PHP do all the work and just use the scripts name

[Wuhtzu]

I'll give it a shot and see if I like it. Thank you wes1890