My Standard practice has been to put a lot of my PHP queries before the Doctype and <head> tags on my pages. Things like <?php require_once (.... and query statements like this:
Then after all of that, and it could be a couple hundred lines of code on a typical page I'll run the html. After the closing html tag at the bottom I'll put the free result for the queries like this:
$query_companyMenuRS = "SELECT id, type, category, `class`, link, approval, description FROM content WHERE approval = 'yes' AND category='company' AND class = 'subMenu' AND type NOT LIKE '%private%' ORDER BY link ASC";
$companyMenuRS = mysql_query($query_companyMenuRS, $civTekDB) or die(mysql_error());
$row_companyMenuRS = mysql_fetch_assoc($companyMenuRS);
$totalRows_companyMenuRS = mysql_num_rows($companyMenuRS);
On the current site I'm working on there are a bunch of elements that may or may not show up on certain pages. Things like side menus, accordions, rotating banner add scripts, even different types of drop down menu's for different areas of the websites. I handle these using standard php include statements placed in the appropriate div tags in the HTML. They typically look like this:
Here's the question: Does it hurt anything to put all of that PHP that is usually before and after the HTML inside the includes that I place inside the HTML in div tags? It seems to work fine but is it slowing down the site or potentially causing other problems?
<?php include('includes/sideMenu.php'); ?>
Thanks for your input.