Hello Folks,

 

The problem:

A while back I was struggeling with my menu. I couldn't get my menu buttons to stay in active state without adding a diffrent id or class to my body tag on every page. Now that I found a way to do this without giving id's to my button's, I thought I'd share it with you.

 

btw this is my first tutorial ever and english is not my native language, so bare with me if everything is a bit chaotic.

 

Let's get starded:

The code i starded of with was a basic list menu, styled with CSS.

<ul class="main_menu">
<li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="portfolio.php">portfolio</a></li>
<li><a href="aboutme.php">About me</a></li>
<li><a href="blog.php">Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="contact.php">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

To know on which button needs to be active we need to know what page we are on, so first thing we need to do is get the url of the current page.

this can be done with a simple php command.

$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]

this gives the full url of the current url, for example.

http://www.localhost/mysite/index.php

This is great now we know which page we are on. We only need the last tiny bit of the url though to know which button need to be active. to get this part we can use the following php code.

basename($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"])

Now that we have the information we need we can start to make our menu.

 

<ul class="main_menu">
<li <?php if (basename($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]) == "index.php") echo " class='active_link' ";?> ><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>
<li <?php if (basename($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]) == "portfolio.php") echo " class='active_link' ";?>><a href="portfolio.php">portfolio</a></li>
<li <?php if (basename($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]) == "aboutme.php") echo " class='active_link' ";?>><a href="aboutme.php">About me</a></li>
<li <?php if (basename($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]) == "blog.php") echo " class='active_link' ";?>><a href="blog.php">Blog</a></li>
<li <?php if (basename($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]) == "contact.php") echo " class='active_link' ";?>><a href="contact.php">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

 

The above code checks if the the current page is the same as the link and if it is it adds the class active. Now we can simply style our active button with css.

 

.active a:link {
background-image: url(images/button_active.jpg);
}

 

That's it. Your menu should now have cool shiny active buttons .

 

Problems:

I understand that this menu is far from perfect and it won't work on large websites. I just found it very usefull on my small website projects. It keeps things very dynamic and easy to change.

 

For the people who use subfolders for every page you can use

basename(dirname($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]))

to get the foldername ( this method probably works better if your site gets larger )

 

Well i would like to thank you all for reading. Feedback/ questions about this tutorial is apriciated.

interesting stuff dude. I made my mind and in autumn i will subscribe to a PHP course and learn this darn language

4 those who know a little bit of PHP this will be very helpful

Very useful.

 

I was having to try to use includes with variables. This looks much easier and cleaner. Thanks for sharing.

Thaniks for providing this informaiton to us. It even helped me.

More php CMS you can visit

This is a great method, and I use it often on many sites that I have designed.

 

It does tend to fall down though when you use parameters on php pages

 

e.g. beer.php?country=au

 

If you have a navigation menu where you wish to have a class of 'current' on all the beer.php pages, then:

 

<?php if (basename($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]) == "beer.php") echo " class='current' ";?>

will not work, as you are on a page called beer.php?country=au or a page called beer.php?country=jp etc.

 

however, if, for pages with parameterised file names like above, you use this code:

 

<?php if (basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']) == "beer.php") echo " class='current' ";?>

This will give you a class of 'current' for all pages called beer.php irrespective of the parameters following it.

 

I hope this helps someone out there, and again thanks for the great method.

Cheers, Al.