How to properly build a navigation menu that highlights the current page

Question

I\'ve setup a menu for a fairly simple site based on icant.co.uk. It\'s fairly simple with maybe 5 pages. The small site is mainly a mysql browser for a few tables using MATE.

Answer 1

Not sure if that's what you meant, but this way you'll get rid of this ugly if-else:

$currentFile = Explode('/', $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]);
$currentFile = $currentFile[count($currentFile) - 1];

// easier to manage in case you want more pages later
$pages = array(
    array("file" => "orders.php", "title" => "Orders"), 
    array("file" => "customers.php", "title" => "Customer List")
);
$menuOutput = '
';
foreach ($pages as $page) {
   $activeAppend = ($page['file'] == $currentFile) ? ' id="active"' : "";
   $menuOutput .= ''
               .  '' . $page['title'] .''
               .  ''; 
}           
$menuOutput .= '
';

echo $menuOutput;