PHp:2.x

What About Apache 2.x?

Users of Apache 2 will notice that simple.php does not work as a content handler. For Apache 2.0.x, AddHander works only for existing files. According to reports (specifically, Bugzilla bug ID 8431), Apache 1.x misused the term "handler" so this changed in 2.x.
There is hope. Per that bug report, Apache 2.1 may add a configuration directive to relax the restriction, such that AddHandler can refer to nonexistent files just as it did in Apache 1.x.

Putting It Together: An Overview of the Sample Site

This article's sample web site uses a Front Controller to separate content from layout. The controller maps request URIs to content files, then merges the content with a layout template at request time.
php_include/classes.php contains the helper classes that simplify the process:

• AppConfig wraps an array of common application settings such as page background color.
• SitePage represents a page of content. It wraps a title (for the browser title bar) and the path to a content file.
• PageMap is the backbone of the controller's work. It associates SitePage objects with URIs and holds SitePages for HTTP errors (such as 404 and 500).
• AliasMap holds aliases for the controller-managed URIs.
• Content pages use AliasMap, via Util::aliasLink(), to refer to one another without hard-coding paths in <a> tags. (This is not required, but certainly eases maintenance.) Util exposes a second function, literalLink(), to create anchor tags to offsite resources.

SitePage, PageMap, and AliasMap could be replaced by an XML document; but they are straight code here for the sake of simplicity.
php_include/mappings.php configures the page mappings and populates AppConfig with some values. End-users can adjust site settings here without touching the support classes or controller code.
Controller.php, the controller, weighs in around 30 lines of code because the helper classes do the heavy lifting:

<?php

require_once( 'php_include/classes.php'  );
require_once( 'php_include/mappings.php' );

$daysToCache  = 1.5;
$cacheMaxAge  = ${daysToCache}*24*(60*60);

$layoutFile   = 'php_include/layout_main.php';

$requestedURI = ereg_replace(
    $config->getValue( 'URISuffix' ) .  '$' ,
    "" ,
    $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]
);

$page         = $pageMappings->getPage( $requestedURI );

if( is_null( $page ) )
{
    header( 'HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found' );
    $page = $pageMappings->getNotFoundPage();
}

if( ! headers_sent() )
{
    header(
        'Cache-Control: max-age=' . ${cacheMaxAge} . ',
        must-revalidate'
    );
    header(
        'Last-Modified: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s' ,
        $page->getLastModified() ) . ' GMT'
    );
}

include( $layoutFile );

?>

The actual content files in the content directory are HTML fragments with no layout. The include() function merges them with the layout template. Adding a new page to the site requires placing the file under content, updating the PageMap, and (optionally) updating AliasMap.
The content and php_include directories should never allow direct access, so .htaccess files restrict normal web requests.
.htaccess in the base of the document root contains various Apache settings. Since virtual resources cannot be index documents, RedirectMatch forwards requests for the root URI to /main/index.site. (Change the host and port statements to make the sample code to work on your computer.) AddHandler directives associate Controller.php with requests ending in .site. ErrorDocument directives map HTTP status codes to controller-managed error pages.
The stub directories main and errors permit us to call controller-managed resources with directory paths, for logical grouping. (Recall Apache's handling of nonexistent directories, described above.)