Are you losing the value of your variables when including them in external files?  Use relative pathing!

This may help you out, it took me a bit to figure out what was going on here.

I was working on a WordPress theme’s function.php files, and  quickly accumulated a lot of code.  I wanted to break it down into separate files to make things nice and readable for later.  I moved all top level variables into on include files, and guess what… things stopped working!

Here’s the trick, if you use include, make sure you use relative pathing.. for example:

myVars.php

$foo = ‘this is a test’;

function.php

include(‘framework/custom-admin/myVars.php’);

This method is going to work, and the variables will be accessable from function.php… now to do this wrong, go a head an absolutely path it.  The non-variable bits of the included file will show up, but variable values will be lost.

Here’s what not to do: include(https://my-site.com/myVar.php) or include(get_bloginfo(‘template_url’).’/path’) will also fail.. so beware!