One of my favourites of these is a rather nifty PHP include menu which means you can use an include for your navigation list, but still have the current page highlighted in the site’s navigation, without needing extra markup like adding an ID to the ‘body’ element. I can’t accept the credit for this one because it’s not something I coded, but I’ve been using it for so long now that I can’t remember where I first found it.

All you need is two bits for the navigation; your unordered list for your navigation, which of course you can style in any way you so desire using CSS, and a tiny little PHP snippet. First you’ve got your unordered list (I save mine as ‘menu.html’):

</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="mylink1.php">Link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink2.php">Link 2</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink3.php">Link 3</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink4.php">Link 4</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink5.php">Link 5</a></li>
</ul>
<p> 

<br />
 < ?php<br />
 $menu = file_get_contents("menu.html");<br />
 $menu = preg_replace("|
<li><a href=\"" . basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']) . "\">(.*)]+>|U", "
<li class=\"current\">$1</li>
<p>", $menu);<br />
 echo $menu;<br />
 ?><br />
 

Just place the PHP snippet within your page wherever you want to display your menu.

What does it do? It simply uses ‘preg_replace’ to take your menu, find the link to the current page (basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])), and then remove the ‘a’ tags to remove the clickability for the current page (visitors don’t need to click it because they’re already there), and give the ‘li’ tag a class (’current’) and print out the menu on the page. Of course then you can style the ‘current’ class in whatever way you choose with CSS. Though the same thing can be done using the cascade and CSS, that involves using extra markup (adding an ‘id’ to the body and list (’li’) elements), and of course you have to remember to change the body ‘id’ for each page, and adding extra markup to the HTML and CSS seems a lot more cumbersome than this nifty little PHP snippet that does the job without any extra effort on your part. That’s the sort of code I like!