after writing the above i looked into the flash nav a little to see how he set it up. im going to talk to a few actionscripting gurus about determing which .swf loads based on a solution similar to one that might work for the problem with the iframes. i of course would need some help figuring that out.
i was thinking (and remember, i and seriously out of touch with coding as of late, so a great deal of laughter may be in order) that page2a.php would contain a form with only one input value. upon page2a.php loading, the form would start to process and the value would be sent to and processed by another file (redirect.php) that would have a list of variable and their values. the newly determined value would then be output to page1a.php defining another variable. the last variable of course being which page is to be loaded into the iframe on page1a.php. and just to tie up loose ends, the redirect.php file would make it so that if a value other than one already defined is input, then the page to be loaded into the iframe would be whatever the default page is.
this just sparked another question in my mind which is how do i make it so that when a user attempts to go to a file that on the server that doesn't exist, the server redirects the user to the main index.php page of the site? i have heard of the mod_rewrite module for apache which, if i understand it correctly, does exactly that sort of thing, but i haven't the slightest idea as to how i set any of that up.
i know this is a lot so i'm kind of expecting to be laughed at, but if you have the time and would be willing to give the slightest bit of help, please do. all input is appreciated.
