: Looking for easy-to-maintain and secure directory structure for multipart site I recently inherited an older custom PHP website that consists of three parts: a public section for all to see, a

@Nickens628

As for object structure, I would go from this:

->css
->doc
->inc
->js
->member
->css
->doc
->inc
->js
->admin
->css
->doc
->inc
->js


To this:

->guest
->loginpage.php
->guest_only_item_1.php
->guest_only_item_2.php
...
->guest_only_item_n.php
->common
->shared_php_file_1.php
->shared_php_file_2.php
...
->shared_php_file_n.php
->somestylesheet.css
->somejavascript.js
->someimage.jpg
->someniceimage.png
->member
->member_only_item_1.php
->member_only_item_2.php
...
->member_only_item_n.php
->admin
->admin_only_item_1.php
->admin_only_item_2.php
...
->admin_only_item_n.php


I'm not sure how many items you plan to have for each type of user, so I assumed at least three which is why I listed the item lines three times per section. The common section is for files that are shared by everyone.

Then in PHP, when you load the special page, you can use the following PHP code at the beginning to add the common php files (if applicable) regardless of the section you are in:

include "../common/shared_php_file_1.php";
include "../common/shared_php_file_2.php";


and in the HTML part, you can use the following code fragments in your code to add the common files:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="../common/somestylesheet.css">

<script type="text/javascript" src="../common/somejavascript.js"></script>

<img src="../common/someimage.jpg" width=1 height=1>

<img src="../common/someniceimage.png" width=1 height=1>


If you use the image tag, make sure you set the width and height values to the actual image sizes, and not 1.

Also, in your setup, you will want to have the login script create a cookie of some sorts that stores a special hash that represents that a user is logged in then when the user tries to access the site, have your script read it, and match it up against the user database and if the user isn't in the right section of the site, he/she should be redirected there. If the user isn't logged in, then he/she should be redirected to the guest section.

Just make sure the database has at bare-minimum three fields. One for username, one for password, and one for the type of user.

Vote Up Vote Down