Forum Moderators: phranque
Lest say I want to have the same navigation bar on all my pages. And I have 1000+ pages. So if I decided to add another link to my nav bar, I would have to change each page individually. I don't think large site admins do that. So what kind of things they use to have plain and simple html on large websites?
What do You use to miantain Your site?
Includes are just fine. We use them all the time for our smaller clients.
The bigger companies probably use a web based interface to pull in components for pages. One of our big clients ueses a program that lets you pull in widgets, images, navs, text, footers etc. etc. They can manage these parts globally, or by section. Pages are quick and easy to build and will work EVERY time!
Is it possible to do that stuff with some popular WYSIWYG programs. I use one right now and I don't even know if it is able to do all that stuff.
I'd recommend you spend some time reading all the different forums on WebmasterWorld, the stuff you are asking about is very advanced, and very difficult to do, it's not something you can pop in through dreamweaver, these 'applications' are huge programs that run on servers, and are written and maintained by professional web programmers, they have very little to do with the kind of application you seem to have in mind, a piece of software on your personal pc.
For your questions, try the Apache forum, the PHP forum, the web technologies forums, look around, you'll learn a lot. Depending on how Apache is configured the server can parse php, shtml, whatever, with or without the extensions, and depending on the programming running the site, the pages might look any number of different ways, but that has very little to do with what is actually running it.
Like yoursite.com/webapps/dev01/section3/46.html might actually be something like this: yoursite.com/?main=webapps&sub1=dev01&subsection=3&page=46
Good Luck.
For your example of a common navbar, though, is easy to do with SSI. Changing a link means uploading one tiny file to change every page on the site.
You can do this with Dreamweaver templates, but would of course have to regenerate and upload all affected pages. Very little actual work, but rather tedious and time consuming.
What do You use to miantain Your site
Php, dynamic scripting of navigation, some includes, small home made content management systems when appropriate, apache mod rewrite as in the above example, parsing of url to assign content, there's so many different ways to do it, the most complex is when you use databases to create much of the site, that's how sites like google, most forums, amazon etc, do it. What you use always depends on what you can do, and what the job requires, and the budget you have, how much time you can spend on it, etc.
I don't like things like dreamweaver to do this, when you do programming you want to know what's going on, it takes you into a whole different world of problems and complexity [for example, a simple typo in php will make the page crash completely], and if a program like dreamweaver generated your code it's not going to help much in terms of getting that understanding.
Installing the apache/mysql/php package on your computer is invaluable if you ever want to get into programming, but it's not necessary when you start, since putting in an include is about as easy as anything can get, but even that requires some knowledge about server paths, how to set them, how to parse html pages as php or shtml, and so on.
I have installed apache, mysql, php on my pc locally and I'm trying to learn some php, maybe perl later. I'm planning to build about 1000+ pages site and simply want to prepair for that. There's nothing worse than make a site of 50-100 pages and then change every single page just to add some new feature to whole site. It's better to prepair for maintainance in advance.
If you design your site with pluggable parts that keeps presentation, business logic and processing all separate, it will be much easier to maintain.
BZ
