Thank you all for your answers and collaboration. Although none of the answers did exactly what I was looking for, they showed me other ways to approach this issue and guided me to decide what method to use.
I came up with what I think is the simpliest way to do this:
- I set my folder structure as: pages/aside and pages/main
- I set up an array($asides) with the aside files as the keys and the main content files as the values.
- Then I check if the requested file exists in the main folder.
- If it doesn't exist, I redirect the user to the 404 page. If it does exist, I loop through $asides to see which aside is asigned to that main content page.
- If it doesn't belong to any of the establisged asides, then I include the default aside.
$asides = array(
'aside1' => array('page1', 'page2', 'page3', 'page4'),
'aside2' => array('page5', 'page6')
);
$page = (!empty($_GET['p'])) ? sanitize($_GET['p']) : 'page1';
if (file_exists("pages/main/{$page}.php")) {
foreach ($asides as $key => $value) {
if (in_array($page, $asides[$key])) {
$aside = $key;
break;
}
}
if (!isset($aside)) $aside = 'default';
?>
<div id="aside"><?php require "pages/aside/{$aside}.php"; ?></div>
<div id="main"><?php require "pages/main/{$page}.php"; ?></div>
<?php
} else {
header('Location: ?p=404');
}
The bounty goes to Madara Uchiha because in my opinion, his answer is simple an effective. Thanks again to all of you who helped me with this issue.