I wanted to ask if anyone can teach me how to do the php function, where you make a main page (layout) and then when you click a link it automatically inserts the content from another page into the main page. (kinda like ssi) The urls for sites that do this usually looks like this:

http://www.domain.com/main.php?id=content

where main is the main page and content is the page its supposed to insert into the main page

go to www.sietpoint.com
they let you download the first 6 chapters or so of their php book

lol, will reading those six chapters really teach me how to do this? (thanks for the tip though) it seems to cover only basic things, what i need is a tutorial for this (which i cant find)

You can choose from two ways to do this:

1. Have a template that loads another file. Then your code would load (for example) content.txt, and put it into the template. I've got the code for this if you are interested.

2. Have a database that stores the data to be put into the template. This is slightly more complicated to code but far more flexible.
http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/php/ (if you don't know PHP)
and
http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/
will tell you everything you need to know to do this (and a lot more!)

Let me know if you need any more help with this.