About PHP Includes

I was trying to use PHP include to containerize some repeating HTML code. I made a test script to test out the concept. I knew that PHP is working on the server because I'm using PHP to parse and send a contact page on the same account. I had two files:

index.html
==========
<html>
<body>
<?php include ("header.inc"); ?>
<p>
Some text here, for example this would be the main content of my page
</p>
</body>
</html>

header.inc
==========
<html>
<body>
Some more text here

When I ran the index.html file I would get "Some text here..." but not "Some more text here" and no PHP error.  I fiddled with changing double quotes to single and tried various combinations of paths to the include file. None of this worked. What did work in the end was to rename the index.html file to index.phtml.

By the way, you can name the header.inc file with any extension, but most professionals recomend naming it with php as an extension (header.php) for security reasons. For some purposes (like using with a WYSIWYG HTML editor) it may be better to use an extension of html - this too will work!

The powerful thing about using PHP includes, is not just this little example, but it is when you create a menu system using links to your various pages in the "header.inc" file. when you have done this, you can add a page to your web site by adding one more html file and making one change to the "header.inc" file. If you do not use a system like this, then changing the menu system is a pain becasue you need to got into each file and paste in the new code.

This way you make the changes in one place and just like magic your whole web site has the change.

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Warning: include(/home/stevenf/adds/center-bottom.html) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home1/yenninco/public_html/sub/php-includes/index.phtml on line 151

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening '/home/stevenf/adds/center-bottom.html' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib64/php:/usr/lib/php') in /home1/yenninco/public_html/sub/php-includes/index.phtml on line 151