Add Controls to the PHP Calendar

I showed you how to create a PHP calendar last week. The post was very popular so I wanted to follow it up with another post about how you can add controls to the calendar. After all, you don't want your users to need to wait until the next month to see events outside of the current month, right? Now we'll add "Next Month", "Previous Month", and month/year dropdown controls to the calendar.


The PHP => HTML
/* date settings */
$month = (int) ($_GET['month'] ? $_GET['month'] : date('m'));
$year = (int)  ($_GET['year'] ? $_GET['year'] : date('Y'));

/* select month control */
$select_month_control = '<select name="month" id="month">';
for($x = 1; $x <= 12; $x++) {
$select_month_control.= '<option value="'.$x.'"'.($x != $month ? '' : ' selected="selected"').'>'.date('F',mktime(0,0,0,$x,1,$year)).'</option>';
}
$select_month_control.= '</select>';

/* select year control */
$year_range = 7;
$select_year_control = '<select name="year" id="year">';
for($x = ($year-floor($year_range/2)); $x <= ($year+floor($year_range/2)); $x++) {
$select_year_control.= '<option value="'.$x.'"'.($x != $year ? '' : ' selected="selected"').'>'.$x.'</option>';
}
$select_year_control.= '</select>';

/* "next month" control */
$next_month_link = '<a href="?month='.($month != 12 ? $month + 1 : 1).'&year='.($month != 12 ? $year : $year + 1).'" class="control">Next Month >></a>';

/* "previous month" control */
$previous_month_link = '<a href="?month='.($month != 1 ? $month - 1 : 12).'&year='.($month != 1 ? $year : $year - 1).'" class="control"><< Previous Month</a>';

/* bringing the controls together */
$controls = '<form method="get">'.$select_month_control.$select_year_control.' <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Go" />      '.$previous_month_link.'     '.$next_month_link.' </form>';

echo $controls;
I wont explain the code because it's boring and simple but you may be wondering why I didn't include the controls within the PHP function. Since you may or may not want the controls and will want to style them differently, placing the controls within the PHP function would be a bad idea.