Php Sectionid

[webmaster]

I've seen some websites that have one page, example page.php with a ?sectionid=number so it looks like this: www.example.com/page.php?sectionid=1. Each new page is still page.php, just with a new sectionid. How/why do the developers use this technique instead of different pages?

[smerny]

if ($_GET['sectionid'] == 1){  [something]}if ($_GET['sectionid'] == 2){  [something else]}

Edited June 17, 2009 by smerny

[justsomeguy]

If the pages are the same, but only the content changes, it's easier to maintain a single page that swaps out the content instead of one page per piece of content.

[Synook]

And when a new piece of content is created (e.g. a new blog post) you don't have to manually create a new page, you can just use the querystring to figure out which bit to pull from the DB.