index.html ?

nEmoGrinder

ok this may seem like a real dumb question since I've already coded everything and got it all working.

BASICALLY:

I have an online weekly comic that I want to post online.

I started off by getting hosting, learning GoLive, and creating 2 pages (a homepage index.html and a cast page cast.html)

I soon realized that to build an archive I would have to use PHP.

I built a database containing issue numbers links to comic images and the comic title (which I place in the head as the title).

I then connected to this database and coded the appropriate PHP to make a site that starts with the latest comic and has controls to go to the first/previous/next/last comics as well as disabling the previous and next buttons when at the first and last comics respectively.

I created this page in GoLive and it is called testnav.php

NOW...I have everything working and I'm pretty much good to go, yay for me...

but I basically want to make my testnav.php my homepage, but I can't because its a php file and my homepage has to be index.html.

what do I do? do I basically copy and paste all my source code from testnav.php into index.html? I dont think that would work (and therefore I'm not goign to ruin my homepage by testing it out).

how would I get my index.html page to do exactly what my testnav.php page is doing, but also link it to the php file I created?

ok, let me put it into term that I understand...

when people come to my site www.mysite.com, I want the address bar to say:

www.mysite.com

and have it pull up my latest comic (just like my testnav.php)

once people actually start going through comics, I anticipate the address bar to look like this:

www.mysite.com/testnav.php?cid=2

where cid would be teh comic id (basically the issue number)

if this STILL doesnt make sense, I've been using the site www.questionablecontent.net as a sort of reference point (basically all comic sites like this use the same php code)

ANY help would be WONDERFUL

if need be, the links to my site are:
http://andrew.ulmb.com/ this is the homepage I made as index.html
http://andrew.ulmb.com/testnav.php this is the php I made

EDIT: or is it as easy as saving my index.html as a index.php then deleting the index.html and putting in the appropriate code from testnav.php into index.php?
index is a properly laid out while testnav is just a test page, otherwise I would just rename testnav.php to index.php and delete index.html....would this work?!?!

Thanks,
andrew

djcee

well i think this is what your talking about, but use this code:

<?php

include 'file.php';

?>

Put that in your page where you want the PHP file to display and then change the red text to the URL of the php file!

I think thats what you mean!!

Hope it helps!

viola

I usually do this, i create an index.php file and place this code
<?php
header("location:filename.php");
exit;
?>

basically once you go to www.mysite.com for example, it would look for either index.html or index.php

rename your index.html into something else so that it would just recognize the index.php file
then index.php would point it to your 2nd page. i think that's the testnav.php.

nEmoGrinder

ok, so THIS is what Im going to do...I cant do it yet because I'm at my girlfriends place and she'll yell at me if I start coding when I'm supposed to be spending time with her ><

ANYways...I'll take my index.html page and 'save as' indes.php. This way I keep the layout of the page I originally built and already like. Then I'll take my testnav.php page and enter it into my index.php file while modifying it so that index.php will still LOOK like index.html, but will now contain the code to load the most recent comic as well as all the navigation controls to browse through comics.

Lastly, once the new index.php (or 'whatever I may rename it to'.php) works perfectly as I want it to, I'll delete my current index.html page and just type int the code:

<?php

include 'index.php';

?>

and basically when I go to www.mysite.com, it will find the index.html, see that it references index.php and then just load the index.php file as if that was my index.html....i think.....

Someone told me that if I DONT HAVE an index.html but I DO HAVE an index.php, it will automatically load index.php (the site looks at the name of the file, not the extension) and I WOULD try this, but GoLive doesnt like not having an index.html page in my site and then it bitches at me for a bit.

Basically I'll try both...if I can get it working both ways I'd rather just leave the index.php as my homepage, but if GoLive errors on me I'll keep it the other way. I'll post again when I get home and let you know if it worked!

THANKS A BUNCH!!

andrew

TheDefender

Most hosts that support PHP do have index.php set as a potential default page, so dumping out the index.html file and putting in index.php would work...

Now, something you can look into (if your host supports it) is to use a ForceType in the .htaccess file to force the server into parsing an html file as a php file. It sounds like this may be above your head right now, but as you progress in your learning, you may want to explore this option.

(Note: The ForceType will work on Windows running Apache as well as *NIX running Apache, so you can mimic an offline test environment and online live environment pretty easily.)

You can read up by going here.

nEmoGrinder

you're right...WAY over my head. This is actually the first site I've ever built, html OR php, before this my only experience with coding of ANY kind was a few dirty, DIRTY lines of QBasic in high school computer engineering (most of which was built by searching in google and copying and pasting).

The idea of ForceType is interesting and possibley something to think about in the future, but at the moment I really just want to get my site up and running, once the coding is done I dont want to worry about anything for a while other than getting comics drawn on time and getting people to read them.

I am currently fiddling around with turning my index.html into my index.php, but I forgot to make a lot of fields in my database (one for the date and one for the alt text that appears as you scroll over the image).

I've learned alot considering when I started less than a month ago using GoLive I thought the way Adobe had laid everything out was complicated and messy. Moving from a WYSIWYG html program to actually typing out PHP code to run my site for me with only friendly forums as help really put some demand on me but I'm happy to say things are starting to work out. Once the code works (which it does) I'll need to fool around with how to get it to display different sized images in the same place without distortion and all that, but hopefully that wont take long and my site will be up and running by the end of the week begging for new content.

I will let you know how everything turns out (I'm back home now and dont plan on getting sleep till its sort of done) once it's up!

Thanks,
andrew