How do I connect a single PHP script to multiple pages?
I want to display a "Last Published" date on my site’s articles using PHP. My site files are PHP pages.
Originally I had a piece of code in each article page, however I’ve now learned that is very bad design.
What code would I insert in my article pages to connect to a single, separate php script file, so that my "last modified" date will show up in my articles?
include() or require() the file with the code.
You can use the php function filemtime($filename))
$filename = ‘full path to the file.php’;
// format it to look nice
echo ‘Last Published: ‘ .date ("F d Y H:i:s.", filemtime($filename));
To have this in its own separate include file is a bit of overkill. If you had multiple lines of logic then I would suggest writing a function. I have a common function file that I keep all functions in and then include it on each page.
To write this as a function you could do this:
// where $filename is the path and name of file you are using
function _displayPubDate($filename){
echo ‘Last Published: ‘ .date ("F d Y H:i:s.", filemtime($filename));
}
Then, in your code, you would output this where you want it to display
<?= _displayPubDate("path/to/file.php"); ?>
What I would do is this: make an array of all pages you want to be included.
$pages = array(‘index.html’, ‘home.php’, ‘etc’, ‘etc’);
then with that, you could use this code:
function doIncludePages() {
global $pages;
foreach($pages as $page) {
@require_once($page);
}
}
and use that at the beginning of the file.
Note: creating the array of pages could also help prevent being hacked, if you run a check.