Help Finding Script!!!! ?

Milo_Orr

I am trying to find a script that will allow you to use one page, like a template, than all of the pages with the content to be plain html.

For example, I make an html page with a complex toolbar at the top, then I make many html pages with just the content to go under this toolbar. When you click a link to the page, it loads with the toolbar page (the template) on top, that way if I want to add new sections to the toolbar, I don't have to change every single page... Can anyone help!?

jerdo

I think what you are looking for is called FRAMES. Everyone seems to think they are evil but they save time and bandwidth. If your menu includes images the person won't have to wait for the images to reload everytime they click something. I'm sure there will be plenty of people yelling about frames from here on but lets get real frames were bad back in the Netscape/IE 3.0 days when they didn't handle them so well now they can save your viewers download time and you bandwidth costs.

Milo_Orr

The way the site is set up in relation to the content would not allow FRAMES, unless I wanted to use an IFRAME, but I wouldn't be able to achieve the effect that I desire. Besides, this isn't the 90's, people don't use frames anymore.

mykg4orce

Make a file with your "Top Navigation" bar then save that file. Then when ever you want that navigation bar to appear just use PHP to call it as an include.

require("my_top_nav.php");

or

include("my_top_nav.php");
[\php]

But honestly frames can do what you need with out PHP, why waste server's resources on simple things that HTML can do.

Rohan_Hill

You can do this with PHP or SSI. The SSI way is the way to go if you don't need to put any other PHP code onto the pages. To do this, save the HTML code for your toolbar to a file, say toolbar.html, then rename all the pages of your site which use this toolbar to .shtml. Then in those files, where you want the toolbar to appear, put this: 
That assumes that the files are in the same directory, you'll need to give pathnames if they're not. The PHP way to do this is to rename your files to .php rather than *.shtml, and where you want the toolbar to appear, put <?php include "toolbar.html"; ?>

Milo_Orr

I went with the SSI alternative. As for you other frame lovers, you may not know this, but many browsers, in fact, ALL BROWSERS have what is called a CACHE. I can explain it further if you like.

mykg4orce

I don’t necessarily love frames; in fact passing variables to frames in a PHP set can be quite complex. But I also don’t believe in complicating my work with PHP when I can use HTML to carry out the same effect.

If you don’t like frames, you can use SSI as suggested above. But if your site is PHP, then i suggest you stick with PHP…because SSI will only show up in a “.shtml” file.

p.s. Rohan did I not illustrate how to include using PHP properly? 🙂

Archbob

Its quite easy, make the extension on all your pages .php , .php3, or some extension taht can read php.

Then make a head nav called "nav.php";

And then whereever you want to inplement the headnnav, jsut put:

include "nav.php"

Thanks the way I handle mine.

jerdo

Maybe you haven't heard of a sending a couple of Header() commands in php that stop browsers from caching pages but still allows them to cache images thus saving you bandwidth. Bandwidth can become very expensive if you run a site with any real traffic, thus you want to avoid unnecessary activities that increase it.

mykg4orce

Im amazed at how people only read the original post and dont read any of the replies. If that was done, you guys wouldn't have mentioned "include" for the 3rd time....geeez!

ashley_dawn

Milo Orr wrote:
The way the site is set up in relation to the content would not allow FRAMES, unless I wanted to use an IFRAME, but I wouldn't be able to achieve the effect that I desire. Besides, this isn't the 90's, people don't use frames anymore.

haha, i like that.

i'm having a similar problem right now. when i started designing i used iframes, and they always screwed up the feel of the layout. plus, anytime somebody searched for something in that file, they wouldn't see the whole webpage, just what was supposed to be linked as "home".

well, because of that, i started using layers, which work wonderfully, except they made the code terribly sloppy. breakingdownmusic.com was designed with all layers and if you "view source" you will see that there is code there for 20 pages instead of just one.

the problem:
someone told me i could fix this by getting an iframe effect with php. my setup is a little more complex, though. my layout looks like this. i want it to be viewed with every page, so basically, i need the extra content loaded into that one file (whatever i need to end up calling it). when the viewer clicks a button on the right i need the content to show up in that body area in the middle. how would i do that? a friend told me to use includes, but i'm missing a lot of variables somewhere. could any of you help me out?

thanks in advance 🙂

thorpe

You want to post some code?

ashley_dawn

ha! i don't have any! all i have is that imaged spliced and ready to go, but i am at a complete loss as to where to go from there. everything i've tried in regards to php and ssi has failed. a friend gave me this:

<? phpinclude("path/file.extension"); ?>

and told me to stick it where i wanted it to go ..

didn't work

oh, but i do have a layer up and ready to go that is where i want the files to show in, but that's just basic div tags for now..

ashley_dawn

i take it such a thing isn't as easy as i thought it was ..

tekky

ashley dawn wrote:
i take it such a thing isn't as easy as i thought it was ..

if you are using a table for the main layout placement... when you get to the TD that spans down the rowset to do your vertically narrow menu, use

<?php include_once('menu.php');

or menu.html (if you are using static menus) and you're good to go... if you are using DIV's and CSS to do your layout then populate the DIV that contains the menu with the same code above.

ashley_dawn

i don't understand :/ the image i'm using is linked in my first post. so what i have is that and it's just spliced. here's my code for the layout, and there's one div tag in the area where i want the content to show, so if you could kind of explain what you mean, i would really appreciate it. sorry, i'm just completely lost .. :/

<html>
<head>
<title>ashley dawn // web&graphic designs</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;">

ashley_dawn

ok, there's two div tags. one for content and one for the updates box. i'm not worried about the updates box, though. and if there is something you need me to do to clean the code up some, then just say so :o

tekky

Uhm... so inside the div you want... put <?php include_once('some_content.html/php/blah'); ?> and name your file something.php so PHP parses the include

ashley_dawn

lmao. ok, so what the heck is the extra "/php/blah" part in the code, and how would naming the file "something.php" make that snippet work?

sorry, it's just better for me to get the whole picture at once.. :/

tekky

.html OR .php OR .blah (something else)

something.php would be parsed by the PHP engine, something.html CAN be parsed by the PHP engine but on most servers they are not configured to do this by default... once you have a document being parsed by PHP, include_once('somefile'); will have PHP write that file into the original page as the server is parsing it...

<?php
//file1.php
echo 'this is in file1<br/>';
include_once('file2.html');
echo 'this is after the included html file<br/>';
?>

//file2.html
<h1>This is included by file1.php</h1><br/>
//end file2.html

this would result in this display...

this is in file1
This is included by file1.php
this is after the included html file