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I have searched and searched for the answer to my simple problem, but cannot find the solution.
I am in the process of designing a new website and have incorporated a blog to archive news and articles sent in by the users. My problem lies in the fact that I would like to feature the blog entries in a column on the right of the index page (almost like an iFrame) as well as have a dedicated page for viewing the blog.
I know of a website that has achieved the result but I am not sure if I am allowed to post links here so I'll wait until I am told otherwise before doing so.
In the meantime let me tell you how my site is structured so far.
I am using Dreamweaver 8 and have built a template with a header (my logo and tabbed navigation), a content layer (for the content on each page) and a footer (for text only links and a hit counter).
I have installed Greymatter as the blog software as I do not have SQL installed on my webspace.
Originally I was going to include my header and footer into the greymatter template and link to that as my "news" page.
On my index page I divided the content area into 2 columns (#left and #right), and displayed the blog in an iFrame inserted into the right column...you can guess what happened next...the iFrame showed the blog with it's header and footer! LOL. What a mess!
I thought perhaps that I should leave the grey matter template blank and use a PHPinclude on the actual news page to pull the blog (I've never used PHP include before, I am only going by what I have read) but that raises another concern. If the blog is only ever shown to visitors via an iFrame on the index page of the site and by a PHPInclude on the news page, will the robots ever crawl the constantly updated information in the blog, and worse, even if they do, would they index the blog information as a search result in such a way that if somebody clicked it they would be directed to the blog templates page (i.e. without the site header or footer)? I stopped using html frames years ago for that very reason.
I feel like I'm damned if I do (alter the template of my blog) and damned if I don't.
Could you peeps point me in the right direction and discuss how you would solve the problem?
I think I should add that while I understand HTML, basic CSS, behaviours etc. I have never designed a page in PHP before but I am a quick learner.
Thanks everybody. I have a feeling that a topic like this will help a lot of people over the next 12 months.
Regards,
Chris.
For anybody who reads this thread in the future and who wants to know the answer it is a PHP include.
To use a PHP include in your HTML page simply cut and paste the following code and place it where you would like the new content to appear.
<?php include('http://www.yourdomainname/thenameofthefileyouwouldliketoappear');?></
This can be done on any HTML page but you must resave the .HTML as .php after doing so.
Thankyou.
