SSI Menus and Server Load

Dynamic menus and server load considerations

[GuanoLad]

I am re-doing our entire site. It's going to have a large percentage of it changed into a PHP dynamically generated database driven admin masterpiece (professionally programmed) with some hardcoded pages alongside.

Currently, the dropdown menus are hardcoded into every page, but we would like them to be SSI, so we can adjust the singular text file to add or subtract new entries.

However, having SSI on every page, be they shtml or php or whatever, is going to be a heavy load on our server! So I'm wondering if there is a CSS equivalent of placing a piece of code in a text file and accessing it dynamically, rather than going through the server-accessing nightmare of SSI.

The hardcoded html pages as well as the dynamic pages will all need the same menu (relative to their hierarchy), and if this works there are a few other tables and such that appear on multiple pages that'd also be good to adjust in one place, rather than on each individual instance.

Any ideas?

[Nick_W]

Hi
No equivalent that I can think of but if your stuff is being done in php its really a negliblible strain on the server to include a menu file in your template. Ask your programmer ;)

Nick

[GuanoLad]

Hmm. Yeah, but it's the non-server fed pages that will have the menus that start to mess things up. It's the 'checking to see if it's a php, a shtml, or a regular page' that puts the load on the server.

:(

[Nick_W]

Surely that happens with every page though? -- The server has to check how it handles each page before processing/delivering the page right? -- Or do I miss the point?

Nick

[GuanoLad]

I don't know, I'm going by my sysadmin's advice. I think I'll have to discuss it with him a bit further. Thanks dude!

[Marcia]

Thanks to idiotgirl, or I'd never have known about this:

Extended Server Side Includes [google.com]

Fascinating, I'd forgotten all about it! It's a conditional use of SSI. Could that be relevant?

[Woz]

SSI is independant of the language you use for server side processing and can be done on plain html pages as long as you server is set up to do so.

You may want to check with your host.

Onya
Woz