Help with Relative paths + navigation - php template pages

[WomenXtra]

Hi All,

i have searched online in every tutorial and many forums and I am still struggling to find a solution to my problem. How do I go about solving this please let me know!

I need to design a menu file which I can use across all the website. The file has links on it which takes the visitor to different directories so the structure of the links are like this:

index.php
/categoryone/main.php
/categorytwo/main2.php

and so on.

when I include the html file into the php pages, and I click on the links through the category (subdirectory) files, the links dont work. simply because the links tends to add the directory name on top of the link path already showing in the menu.

so it shows something like this:
/categoryone/categoryone/main.php

am not too sure what do i need?
is there a script? or some code that can dynamically change the urls of the menu to to enable them to work?

please help - i am very stuck!

thanks,
T

ps: could you please post an example how to go about solving this?

[arvana]

Well one solution that comes to mind is simply to leave the folder name off of the link in your include file....

It's hard to answer a question like this without seeing the code itself, and how you are implementing it. It is SSI, PHP, or ...? Please post a link to the site, and the relevant code, so we can have a look.

[cyanide]

Yes, that's one of the problems with using relative urls.

There are a couple ways to achieve this.
a) By extending your use of php and create some variables, specifically one that will be assigned to your domain
eg) $home-page = http://www.domain.com
Then your urls will look like this

<a href ="<? echo $home-page; ?> /somepage.php">

b) You can also try using the base href tag, which would point to your domain also

[WomenXtra]

that worked

thanks a lot :))))

i love this place.

[cyanide]

no problem

which one worked?

[crdesign]

This is why I never use relative urls or paths. With a relative path you must edit every instance of that code if you decide later to change a directory name or move the file somewhere else. With an absolute path this becomes less likely and your code is more portable. Especially if you code using variables in place of things like domain names, etc which may change if your code moves.