[Petronella]

I'm working on a website that eventually will have thousands of pages. Usually the sites I make are a lot smaller than that, and I design all the pages individually. However, for this job that is obviously not an option.

I know that you can do this somehow in PHP, for example, you see this a lot: index.php?page_id=xx

Can someone explain to me how exactly this works? I know only a tiny bit PHP, but I'm sure I can figure it out, I just don't know where to start.

Thanks.

[Cborrow]

Well the index.php?page_id=xx is a Get request. You access that like this.

<?php
$page = $_GET['page_id'];
?>

and you would use that to access a Database or the like to call your sites content

<?php
$page = $_GET['page_id'];

$r = mysql_query("SELECT title,content FROM pages WHERE id = '$page'");

while($rows = mysql_fetch_array($r)) {
    //Display your content
    }
?>

That is a small simple example as to what you would need to do. Check out theses sites/books for more info.

PHP MySQL Tutorial
PHP/MySQL Tutorial
Build your own Database Driven Website using PHP & MySQL - Third Edition [PHP & MySQL Tutorials]

And if you still need to learn the basics of PHP

4WebHelp - PHP Basics
PHP Basics -- Introduction

Also PHP's site has a wealth of knowledge in the documentation and there comments

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor