Time is Money (part 1) - The Lazy Programmer Strikes Again (
Page 6 of 9 )
Once
the user is successfully logged in, "menu.php" takes over and generates a menu
of functions available to the user.
The first thing "menu.php" (and every
other script) does is to verify the existence of a valid session - this is
necessary to prevent unauthorized users from viewing the pages. If a session
doesn't exist, the browser is immediately redirected to the error page.
<?
// check for valid user session
session_start();
if(!session_is_registered("SESSION_UID"))
{
header("Location: error.php?ec=1");
exit;
}
?>
Assuming the session check does not fail, a basic HTML page
is built.
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<?
// display page header
$title = "Main Menu";
include("header.inc.php");
?>
<?
// code to build main menu goes here
?>
<? include("footer.inc.php"); ?>
</body>
</html>
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how "menu.php" works,
I want to draw your attention to the manner in which each page within this
application is built.
Each page generated through this application has a
particular layout - a logo in the top left corner and a blue bar below it
containing a page title. The bottom of every page has a copyright notice and a
disclaimer. Since these elements will remain constant, through the application,
I've placed the corresponding HTML code in separate header and footer files, and
simply include()d them on each page.
Again, by separating common
interface elements into separate files, I've made it easier to customize the
look of the application; simply alter these files, and the changes will be
reflected on all the pages.
The variable $title stores the title for each
page, and is used by "header.inc.php" - as you can see.
<!-- header.inc.php -->
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<td><a href="logout.php"><img src="images/logo.gif" width=131 height=70
alt="" border="0" vspace="5"></a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#3098C3"><font color="white"> <b><? echo $title;
?></b></font></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>
