htdig and templates

[karlovac]

I'm building a site that uses templates in this manner:

The pages are called whatever.php, and they all have an included, dynamically generated header, which contains the primary & secondary navigation.

i.e. ALL the links are generated by PHP, and are not included in the files.

I've installed ht://dig, and it doesn't like this setup. The manual says that ht://dig uses hyperlinks to crawl the site (just like the big engines), but that breaks my template setup.

Has anyone found a way around this?

Antun

[sarahk]

I suspect your problems go further than you think.

I use a free tool called Xenu to analyse my links (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) and was shocked the first time to find that my perfect site was throwing 404 errors everywhere because the headers weren't parsing properly. Got it fixed and off we go, happy search engines.

A search engine should be searching for usable links on rendered pages so shouldn't care how you deliver those pages - templates or not.

I'm not familiar with htdig but it should work in a similar way. If not, you may want to evaluate alternatives.

[karlovac]

Thanks Sarah.

After much frustration I discovered what it was:

Something in the client-side JavaScript was causing ht://dig not to parse those pages.

I found a cure that blocked out the script tags from the search engine. So you were right - it had nothing to do with PHP, or my templates.

Take care,

Antun