Alternate to shared borders? - Webmaster General forum at WebmasterWorld - WebmasterWorld

Forum Moderators: phranque

Message Too Old, No Replies

Alternate to shared borders?

mims1979

5:32 am on Mar 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

During the early stages of site development, it was easy as pie to use FP shared borders. Now my site is 1000's of .htm pages and I'm trying to make it a little more lean. I've already tweaked graphics to the limit, removed whitespaces, used style sheets, etc. Anything I could think of to make pages load faster and cleaner. Now I'm on to the "Shared borders" feature. They are extremely convenient, but I'm at the point where I have outgrown them. I tossed around the idea of converting everything over to a dynamic format (asp, php, etc) and use SSI includes but with the tons of sites that link to me, search engine placements, etc I can't risk having a bunch of 404's and I'm on IIS and can't find the ability to do a bunch of redirects to new pages. Bottom line is I would like to achieve the same function of FP's shared borders, but without frontpage. I'm doing my best to get rid of as many tables as I can, but when every page of my site is inside of 1 table because of the shared borders, that's impossible to do. Does anyone have any recommendations/solutions to this problem?

Marcia

5:39 am on Mar 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

With Apache you can have the .htm pages parsed with server side includes by adding a line or two in an .htaccess file. You can also do so for using php includes (not both). So you wouldn't even have to think about doing redirects, it wouldn't be necessary.

I don't know if there's an equivalent capability with IIS, but if there is it's a good alternative because the page names stay exactly the same, just with the added ease and functionality of using SSI. If not, you may want to consider a move to Apache if it'll make your life simpler long term.

Oh, and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

mims1979

2:32 pm on Mar 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Yes, i fully understand the functions available to me with apache, But im really trying to see if I can't stay where I am server wise and implement some type of non-frontpage shared borders.

bill

2:56 am on Mar 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Welcome to WebmasterWorld mims1979.

The solution to your problem is FP's Included Content (That's what it's called in FP 2003. In earlier versions it was Include Page.) The Include works just like SSI, but will only work between your <body> tags. It is very powerful and will save you from FP's Shared Borders which are the cause of many problems.

mims1979

3:21 am on Mar 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Yes, I have ran that idea a couple times too, but part of the reason I'm trying to get away from the shared borders as well is because I want to not have to rely on server extensions either. I really don't want to have to rely on 3rd party extensions to make this work. Its sounding like I'm just going to have remove the shared borders, use div tags for positioning and do a global search and replace on every file on my site everytime I need to change a border. Guess I could write a perl script or something to handle it. Thanks for the welcome, I'm sure you haven't seen the last of me. Let me know if you guys think of anything else!