I am working on an ecommerce website that users will have their own page, like the profile page on Facebook or that on nairaland. eg nairaland. com/olasesi, it's probably nairaland. com/olasesi.php but htaccess rewrote it that way, I know.

<b>What is the advantage of creating dynamically a page for individual user. Why not just use a single file and then choose the variables from the database. eg xyz. com?id=23&username=olasesi. Do people think it's better to have several pages of individual even as the content of the file would most likely be the same? It would contain the same header and footer and at best use php includes.</b>

An excellently wrong idea! What happens when you want your users to edit their profiles? You create separate edit_profile.php for each of them, right? WRONG!

LaiveNg:
An excellently wrong idea! What happens when you want your users to edit their profiles? You create separate edit_profile.php for each of them, right? WRONG!

It's php that would do the job. e.g UPDATE users SET date_expires = ADDDATE ... etc. It's all going to be dynamic. I can change anything of the profile. One would not be able to change the profile of others, only one's profile can be edited, because the id of individual user is different. The first if condition would be if one is logged in, and the next nested if would be if the username id in the database is the same as the username .php. If its not, that means its another persons profile. You can only see it but can edit it. Just like Facebook and nairaland.

LaiveNg:
An excellently wrong idea! What happens when you want your users to edit their profiles? You create separate edit_profile.php for each of them, right? WRONG!

In fact, one can have a general edit page for all users, just as nairaland does. But the profiles are different and individual.

olasesi:


In fact, one can have a general edit page for all users, just as nairaland does. But the profiles are different and individual.

I can't try to implement such a design because I think it won't be efficient and the main purpose of PHP as a language for building dynamic sites will be rendered almost useless.
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Also, there will definitely be some performance issues when total users hit tens of thousands up to even millions... For example, with this design, NL with over 1.5 million users will potentially have 1.5 million files, each file for a user... Wow! To me it's worthless!
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However, i think this design pattern will be suitable for strictly non-database-driven applications...

Having a single page where the information gets to change depending on the current user is better. Like someone mentioned, would you now have let's say 50 different pages for 50 users? And moreover, you'll give yourself more headache in trying to do this. And when it comes to maintenance later on, it will give you too much unnecessary work. Computers are meant to make things easier for us, let us maximize that.

A single page should get the job done.