Directories php

Question

I have the image directory, mysite/2012/5/15/image.jpg, and I have my header and footer at mysite/. Then I fetch image.jpg from the database and display in a another page along with the title and comments (if any) submitted by users. Inside header.php and footer.php, I point to a css file that is also located in mysite/ directory. my question is: what is the best way to access the header and footer from my image directory? The way i'm doing it is as follows:

include('../../../header.php');
include('../../../footer.php');

but the after I do this and try to display the page, the css file doesn't load because it doesn't not exist in the image directory. To handle this, I put a bunch of if statements in the header and footer:

       if(!strcmp($thisPage,"images")) {
          echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"../../../file.css\" media=\"screen,projection\" />";
          echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"../../../file2.css\" media=\"print\" />;";
       }
       else
       {
          echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"file.css\" media=\"screen,projection\" />";
          echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"file2.css\" media=\"print\" />";
       }

Is there a better way of doing this?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I would suggest you use absolute paths instead of relative paths.

If you are concerned that you may want to change your directory structure and don't want a huge hassle of replacing all the absolute paths, then you could store the absolute path in a PHP variable or constant, or even an Apache server variable, so if your directory structure changes, you only have to update one variable:

define("CSS_PATH", "http://mysite.com/css");

echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"". CSS_PATH ."/file.css\" media=\"screen,projection\" />";

// OR

// add `SetEnv CSS_PATH "http://mysite.com/css"` to your Apache config file or envvars file

echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"{$_SERVER["CSS_PATH"]}/file.css\" media=\"screen,projection\" />";

Answer 2

You can use a constant or you can simply use:

echo $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]; //outputs www.example.com

which gives you the domain of your website.

echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"http://". $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] ."/css/file.css\" media=\"screen,projection\" />";

However, one correct to what Travesty3 has when you are linking to a style sheet you can't use the file system location, you need to use a URL for CSS files.

define("CSS_PATH", "http://mysite.com/css");

Normally when I start a site one of the first things I do is setup constants like so:

define('ROOT_DIR',$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
define('SITE_URL','http://www.example.com/');
define('JS_DIR',SITE_URL . 'js/');
define('CSS_DIR',SITE_URL . 'css/');