.php Wed Page Extension

bristol

I have successfully used php in the index page for a year. I recently tried to improve the site by using an include for common html code such as mastheads and footers. I have used this technique successfully in other sites where all of the pages had .html extensions. When I used the same code in the index.php it would not work. I then tried it on the non-php pages that had a .html extension and it would not work.

I then used a php include

<?php include ("footer.html"); ?>

and it then worked but the include

for all of the other .html pages did not work.

Do I need to change the extension of all of the .html pages to .php and then use the php include format? Is there a way to get the .html include to work when one of the pages is using .php?

Thanks,

dagon

unless you specificly tell the server to pass the .html page as php, it wont. If you view the source you will see your php. You can either change the file name to .php or tell the server to pass this, or may be all, files as php files.

for the latter, add to .htaccess

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

there are a few variations on this depending on your particular setup.

NogDog

The "<!--#include" method is a server-side include (SSI) which is a separate animal from PHP includes. Personally, I would not try to mix the two, as that could become a maintenance nightmare. Anyway, the SSI stuff is driven by the web server configuration. Many servers are configured to look for a specific suffix such as ".shtml" to process such SSI includes.

So long story short, if it were me and there were not too many files that had to be changed, I'd switch them all to .php with PHP include()/require() instead of SSI. In fact, even if there were a lot of them, I might whip up a script to globally change all of the to PHP includes. 🙂

bristol

I tried the changes to .htaccess without any success. I will make the move to convert all .html pages to .php. Thanks for your help.

Ashley_Sheridan

Don't forget that when you change all the page names, you will likely lose all of the SEO ranking your site has already gathered.

bristol

Good point! Part of the change process is to add google analytics so each page so I stand to gain more info in the long term vs. the short term loss o the ranking. The site index page did not change as it was already a .php extension.

Ashley_Sheridan

You can add 301 redirects in an .htaccess file to tell search engines that the page has moved, which should mean they move the ranking associated with a page.