Wouldn't it be cool if you could produce a random page design for your visitors each time they refreshed the page? Of course!

This is a very simple tutorial teaching you how to generate random page designs using the power of PHP.

Skill needed: Beginner - Intermediate

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Let's Begin

First of all, create a new PHP page in your text editor. Begin by copying pasting the following:



In English, it is basically:

$styleno = 1;
The number of stylesheets you have made. Remember, due to the way languages
like PHP count, your numbers will start with zero. So add up the number of
stylesheets you have and subtract one. Complicated? Not really when you think
about the excellent results.

$stylerand = rand (0, $styleno);
This creates a variable which has a random number as a value. If you haven't used it before, the 'rand' function takes a starting number (0 in this case) and generates a random number using digits up until the specified end (a variable in this case). The $styleno at the end inserts the number of stylesheets you specified earlier.

We'll get onto naming the stylesheets later.

Next we'll need to start the html part of the page.

Underneath the PHP you just inserted, add



Of course if you want you can add all of your meta tags and doctype declarations but i've kept it simple for brevity.

The bit you need to focus on is the ''

What that is basically saying is 'include a stylesheet with a randomly numbered name', it's easier to give an example than to explain; Before we generated a
random number, this number will be used in your stylesheets. For instance, if you generate the number 3, this script will include stylesheet 3 or style3.css.

Which brings me on to stylesheet numbering. Basically, you have to name you stylesheets 'style' then a number '.css'. E.g style1.css, style2.css. But, as I mentioned before, the numbering starts with zero so you would begin style0.css, style1.css and so on.

One last step. After the head insert your tags and all your beautiful CSS powered content.

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Here's the script as a whole if you want to just copy and paste:



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Well that's it! You got through it. Hopefully i've explained this well and it should be easy for you.
Any problems, just reply and I'll try to help.

Hi Adam, didn't know you was a member here, thankyou for this tut will be helpful to some.

Thank you Adam!

Glad you agreed on my request

Thanks for puttin this up for us Adam

Great stuff!

Eddie

No probs, I'll post an addition when I have time showing you how to 'bookmark' your favourite styles using cookies.

cool tut.. thanks for making

This post has been edited by Iceshifter: Jun 14 2005, 10:07 AM

Can you include how to add not randomly but so i could select what style i want to use?

Cool tutorial. I agree that while each page being random would be fun, you should have a way to lock the style on one you want, maybe setup a session variable such as:




someone could click "Save this style" and it would load the page with page.php?style=2

then in the code it could be:



Kind of sloppy but it could work.

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