external variables

Hey fellas, I ran into a little problem which i couldn't quite figure out. I have a page (index.php) which consists of a table ------- |_menu_| | main | |______| |footer| something like that, now the menu and the footer are set but the main includes a page which is selected from the menu, say news.php <?php if (empty($page)) $page = "home"; html_menu($page); html_main($page); html_footer(); ?> $page=news so the url would be index.php?page=news now on the news page i require an id to find the correct news item index.php?page=news&id=1 but now the id gets sent to the index.php and not to the news.php and so when i click on a different news header i get nothign since the $id is never passed to news.php, how can i fix this? do i have to make separate pages, and add the header and footer to every single one? or can i do it while keeping the index.php as the page and changing the main table? thanks, Jule -- Jule Slootbeek jslootbeek@clarku.edu http://blindtheory.cjb.net