Attempting to build template but Having Issue with gets and posts I am building my first real php web app. as many you know this requires building LOTS of pages.

in attempting to streamline the repetitive stuff i placed most of my stuff within a content.php page which looks like this

?php include_once ('config3.inc');?&gt;
&lt;?php if(isset($_GET['p'])){
    $page = $_GET['p'];

}else {
    $page ='';
}
?&gt;
&lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
&lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en"&gt;

&lt;head&gt;
&lt;meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"&gt;
    &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /&gt;
    &lt;title&gt;&lt;?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?&gt;&lt;/title&gt;
    &lt;?php include('styles.inc');?&gt;

   &lt;?php include('api.inc'); ?&gt;
   &lt;?php include('scripts.inc');?&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;

&lt;body&gt;
&lt;div id="container"&gt;
    &lt;?php include ('header.inc');?&gt;

    &lt;div&gt;&lt;!-- Content --&gt;
    &lt;?php include  ('./content/'.$page);?&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;

&lt;/div&gt;&lt;!-- end container --&gt;
&lt;!-- Footer --&gt;
&lt;?php include ('footer.inc');?&gt;
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;


This way when I want to call up a page I go to www.domain.com/content.php?p=pagename.php and it will "wrap" everything in the correct style sheets container and footer etc.

had been working well until I started making my CRUD pages requiring that pagename use POST data.

Is there a better approach for this or do I need to scrap this approach entirely?
Well a more elegant approach would be to use an MVC pattern as a starter framework I would suggest you to use Laravel it's very clear written and also an easy catch for people who are general new to MVC. The way your currently writing the code, you include to much business logic inside of it. 

Which in the long term is terrible because the code becomes un-maintainable, for that the MVC Pattern is the best way to write clear and maintainable code, but check it out yourself. An good article to start with should be this one by Nettuts, called MVC for Noobs don't get irritated by the name the article is pretty good and should get you a basic understanding of the MVC pattern.

Hope I could be a little help :)