Custom PHP includes allows you to unleash the customization and flexibility of the Soholaunch Pro Edition. Through your own authored scripts, you can maximize the operation of your web site and detail the control of how pages display to your site visitor as well as integrate bulletin boards, shopping cart gateways and chat rooms.

Because detailed PHP instruction is beyond the scope of this document, it is understood that this section is intended for developers and web designers who are very familiar with the PHP programming language.

Because all of your custom scripts will be used to drive the interaction between your site visitor and your web site it is important that you have a basic understanding of the structure in which the Pro Edition was programmed.

The Pro Edition client side runtime files process each page request utilizing two main files that are copied to your document root each time you login to the Pro Edition. These files are called index.php and pgm-realtime_builder.php and are responsible for combining page content with your template selections as well as generating any dynamic objects needed for content. Because they are copied to your document root each time you login to the Pro Edition, any modification to the scripts should be made to the base files located in the sohoadmin/client_files/base_files directory.

Understand that because of the amount of features built-in to the product, there is always a lot of activity going on behind the scenes within the scripts at all times. Each time a site visitor enters your site, a session id is assigned and if possible a cookie is set for tracking purposes. Site statistics are then calculated and data based; internal variable data is set; if this is an authenticated user, global variablesare set for other modules to “notice” and the final output processed.

The key to building awesome includes is understanding what this internal variable data is and how to access it. Every custom PHP include is executed just like you added the include function to the index.php file [ie: include(“myscript.inc”); ].

Each include is processed the same way you would program an include to work in any other program. Its is capable of using variables that are set or present before the include executes and it is capable of changing system variables as the script processing runs.

Any scripts that you create can be made available to the system by simply saving your script with a standard .php extension or the .inc (include) extension and uploading the script via the “File Manager” section of the Pro Edition. For security reasons, it is best to save your scripts with .php extensions.