Failing at PHP

darleysam

It's been a long time since I did any web design, and what I know is very basic, rudimentary stuff, and so it stands to reason that I'm completely stumped at the moment. I'm building a website for my band and using Wordpress to manage all the content, posting both news updates and gigs and having the PHP separate them out and post them in separate iframes (yes there'll be a neater way to do it, no I don't know what it is). The problem I've got is that I want to use the same 'gig' posts on two separate pages, formatted differently. As in, on the front page just have a list of the headings in a small font, then on another page the complete entry with more details in a bigger font. It's reusing the same CSS tags across both pages (checking the source on the site confirms this) even though the page has different commands. Is there something I can easily drop in to fix this?

Nightslyr

Can you look under the hood and see exactly how the different commands/functions are displaying the output? Are they calling other functions to handle the output, or just spewing HTML + CSS directly to the page?

flatlinegraphics

there should be a chunk of php that calls the database for the posts. wrap them in a div with different class names.
ex:

<div class="onetypeofpost">
<?php 
//code that gets the posts
?>
</div>

<div class="othertypeofpost">
<?php 
//code that gets the posts
?>
</div>

the php call will be the same, but from a DOM standpoint, they will be different.
you can then referece
.onetypeofpost .postitem1 {border:1px solid red}
.othertypeofpost .postitem1{border:1px solid blue}

if this is wordpress, you may have to dig into the /theme/ directory to find out where these things are. they can be in different places depending on the theme.

and no, iframes are not your answer. they are never the answer.
<?php include('path/to/file.php');?> is what you want.

darleysam

Just dropped out one iframe to test the php include, and it works fine to pull the content in, but it seems to screw up the html for the table it's going into..

edit: no, wait, fixed it in part. I'd just been sloppier than usual. Still not got the class-name tags working right yet, but I'll post my code up in a bit so you can see what I'm doing wrong.

edit 2: okay, seems like getting the includes working neatly has helped the problem from the start. Should hopefully be alright now.. thanks a lot guys!