ssi and fp includes

advantages disadvantages

[soapystar]

I'm working with an FP enabled webspace. Need to use ssi on exsisting pages and dont want to change file extensions. Using fp includes seems a very east route, is there any reason why ssi would still be better over fp. What would be the advantages and disadvatages between the two? Thanks.

[tedster]

My understanding of FP includes is that they help you assemble the pages during local construction, but the include is actually done prior to FTPing the files up to the server. Whereas SSI is done on the server, at the time the page is requested and served.

So FP includes will use slightly more disk space on the server - but the convenience to you as author will be about the same. However, watch out for FrontPage's notorious code bloat. People do make decent HTML with it, but it takes some vigilance.

[soapystar]

first thing ive realised is that any changes to the included page mean re-ftping the main page too...i guess because of the checksum..so a large site with the same include on each page..say for a navigation bar, would mean uploading most of the site again..thats how it appears to me anyway...

[Marcia]

If you're on Apache you can add a file handler in htaccess so SSI will work on .html pages. I *LOVE* SSI - you make one simple change to one text file and it changes across the whole site.

[abbeyvet]

The advantages can be the same - update one page, update the whole site, or as many pages as the include is in.

One thing that is VERY important is whether you FTP or publish the site using FP.

FP includes will work to a point if you FTP, but as you have discovered if you FTP and make changes to the included page you must also FTP up all the pages in which it is included in order for the changes to appear. Which is a nuisance and sort of defeats the purpose.

However if you publish, using the option "Publish changed pages only" then you do not have to worry about that.

Some less experienced users of FP especially like FP includes for two other reasons.

1. They are visible in wysiwyg view when you are working on the site locally, which a lot of people like.
2. You can move pages about, including include pages, rename them and so on and FP will update all the links for you. Which is handy, and is not the case with SSI includes in an FP site.

As Marcia points out you can have pages parsed for SSI using .htaccess. Just add this to your .htaccess file:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .html
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

It would be as well to ask permission from your host before you do this, it can be considered a violation of your host's terms and conditions, better safe than sorry!

Personally I prefer SSI as I like to use .txt files for included pages, which FP will not handle.

[soapystar]

i did read about some disadvantages with using the ssi command to parse ssi pages as html,,i forget most of it but one disadvantage is that all pages are checked for includes whether they have them or not..with considerable server overheads....my main reason for going with fp includes is to avoid that since i also do not want to change my extensions...

[abbeyvet]

The overhead on a server to parse .html pages for SSI is not that big a deal. It might have been years ago, but with modern servers it really is unimportant in the vast majority of cases. Most sites (even servers) won't get traffic levels that mean the SSI overhead will affect serving time.

Of course if you are looking at hundreds of thousands of page views daily at your site it may be a different story ......