I recently asked myself the same question - and came up with a php solution!
This is realtively easy to code and you can make it up yourself if your into the language a bit (that's how I did it).
My goal was the same as yours: to display different content on the same index.php when clicking a link. The solution is that, instead of making the links redirect to another file, make them assign a value to a variable!
this would for example look like this:
<a href="?content=music">Music</a>
that doesn't redirect you to another page but just assigns the value "music" to the variable "content" (you can name them in whatever way you want of course). It adds an appendix to the url, so it would go from
http://yourdomain.com/index.php
to
http://yourdomain.com/index.php?content=music
So you're still on the same page/file. All that the new url says is
"Youre on the index.php AND the variable content equals music!"
But how does this help with displaying differing content? Well to make it work, your index.php will need to work with a simple if statement and php includes. Your index.php (yes, it's gotta be .php - but don't worry it won't make much of a difference ;)) will look like this:
[...]
<body>
<a href="?content=home">Home</a>
<a href="?content=music">Music</a>
<?php
$content= $_GET[content];
if ($content== "home") {
include ('home.php');
}
elseif ($content== "music") {
include ('music.php');
}
elseif ($content== "") {
inlude ('home.php');
}
?>
</body>
I'll just assume here that you've never worked with php before and so I'll explain that code snippet line by line.
First you got your navigation, assigning values to variables, after that, the php code follows. First of all the code needs to know what to do with the variable 'content'.
$content= $_GET['content'];
just means that the variable content's got the value we assigned to the variable 'content' up in the hrefs.
Now, the if statement kicks in. I'll just translate what it does:
If the variable 'content' has the value 'home', the content of home.php will be displayed here (in this case you have to save the actual content of your home to a separate file called home.php)
Else, If the variable 'content' hast the value 'music', the content of music.php will be displayed here (again, the content of your music page has to be stored in a file called music.php)
And finally, if the variable 'content' has NO VALUE (and it doesn't have one when you first come onto the site since you haven't clicked on any links yet and assigned a value) the contents of home.php will be displayed here. This just ensures that you'll see the content of 'Home' when you first visit the site.
And that's it already! You can see this technique in action here:
http://saugi.pointclark.net/newHaase
I hope I got this across quite good - please excuse if I overexplained everything =)
Anymore questions more than welcome!
Don