soo, i am unknowledgeable of ALL best practice.

lets say i call a php file called loader.php with a $_GET['type'] parameter, then after i check if type is actually set i switch the parameter and my logic then does stuff appropriate for $type..

do i create a lot of sub files with the program logic in it or do i just create subfunction (which i have to pass variables if necessary)?

Switch( $_GET['type'] ) { case 'foo': include "logic/foo.php"; break; default: echo "error"; break; }

or is the whole concept totally alien and stupid? i most honestly say that i dont know exactly what i could google to find an answer

@nregev the funny thing is...2009 when the earth and i were young i "programmed" small browsergame that never saw the light. Now i am doing something else and i thought making it web based solves problems down the line, i already started to write a handler for ajax requests that currently uses two very similar function..40 minutes ago i remembered that i used to include stuff instead of making functions.

thanks for your input and participating in using devrant as SO surrogate Oo

Separating the different parts into separate files and including them like you did can be fine as long as your application is not really complex. A huge application can be a pain to maintain if you end up with hundreds of files for hundreds of different options.

Just make sure to not copypaste code in a thousand places and move boilerplate and repeated code into functions as much as you can and you'll surely be fine. Also, you could look into using a templating engine so you don't mishmash PHP code and HTML everywhere and can even also reuse common chunks of HTML if you need to. Good old Smarty can be a good choice, but there are a lot.

@ethernetzero its way worse than you imagine...

i actually do use smarty (cause i wasnt intelligent enough to bother with other template engines and smarty existed 10 years ago).

Right now it works like this:

PHP generates general pages and populates smarty templates according to the language file (which is totally irrelevant for the moment). Then, after a page is loaded as such javascript with the support of jquery loads data tables dynamically from a "loader.php" that just checks if the user is logged in, has appropriate user level and such and then returns a json which in turn then gets used by the jquery/javascript monstrosity to build very simple tables that contain all the data that might get loaded from a database. See other rants of mine on how well i understand javascript :/.

Thanks for your input