This is more a "best practice" question than it is a coding question. In regards to coding your header/navigation and footer sections in a website. Is it better to code it on each page or use the includes tag?
Coding it on each page seems very tedious and violates the golden rule of "never repeat yourself", so using the includes tag seems like the most obvious choice but I could be wrong.
I'm average at best when it comes to best standards in web design so I'm looking to get some input from the pro's so to speak.
Just as a side note, as far as I know you need some kind of "desktop server" in your development setup to use the includes tag, me working straight from my desktop then won't be able to test with the includes tag, is this correct?
Thanks in advance!
If your website is in PHP, then definitely use the include function for repeating content - not just the header/footer, but any repeating modules through the pages, too.
This means that any time you need to update your header, you don't need to do it separately on every page!
As for working locally - you can install PHP onto your computer, and have a local server environment to test with. If that seems daunting, then just upload to a test website before you upload to your live website, so you can use the PHP server there.
You shouldn't repeat code. Imagine that you have to change your header one day... you must need to make the change on all your pages! That's an absolute no-no.
Related
We have a web app that we want to integrate in the websites of several clients by a subdomain, since in most cases we cannot modify their webs. Besides, our web is build in a different language and we want to keep it in our servers.
At the moment, they are adding links on their site's menu to our subdomain, however, they want to keep the same header and the footer so that the user feels that they are on the same website.
For now, we are copying the html and inserting it in our template, but this is not a good solution for the future and we are having several problems due to javascript conflicts.
How can we solve this? An iframe does not allow us to modify its content, I think. Thanks in advance.
Don't know any good ways to do this client side.
First thought is to have all the pages link your Javascript to create the header/footer, but it's not good to require Javascript to display content.
HTML imports would really be perfect for this, but it not well supported. You can consider if you're willing to use a polyfill, like Google's webcomponents.
I feel like best approach here would be to do this somehow not on client side. Either use a server that lets you use a template engine, or some static site generator that supports templating.
I've never used WordPress.org before. I'm wondering if I can convert this html website that I have to wordpress exactly the same?
https://reporting.pacificamerican.org/pas/
And if this website is a wordpress site, does it means that I don't have to go into the codes if I want to update my content? Because right now with html site it takes more time to update all the contents.
Thank you.
Yes, you can, but looking at the content I wouldn't say it looks like a great idea. Mostly because of how static the current content seems to be.
Pros:
It looks like you are about to add a blog-page. WordPress does make such re-occuring content easy.
It looks like you have repeated the menu on every page. (If you change the menu on one page, then you have to makes changes to all pages as well?). WordPress would help with that and let you use one menu everywhere. But there are also tons of easier methods to accomplish the same thing without WordPress. (For example <?php include 'menu.php';?> using PHP).
Cons:
The "multiple sub-pages in one page" that you are using doesn't play naturally with WordPress. Absolutely possible yes, perhaps not even difficult, but not out-of-the-box for sure.
The time it would take to edit pages would likely not change as drastic as you hope. I believe that the current content looks so static that anyone with a bit HTML/CSS knowledge would rather want to edit those static html files over having to click around in the WordPress admin interface.
The scroll-spy, editing tables and things like the yearly admissions does not come naturally either. I can think of a few dozen ways to solve such things with WordPress, but if you are going to do this work yourself, then the WordPress-conversion will take some effort and the results will not always be as pretty as you might imagine.
You'll definitely take a performance hit over using only static html. (But that is true for any CMS/framework)
My suggestion would be to first look at your current workflow. Perhaps look at an IDE that can upload with a click or on save, have history so you can back up when things break, and predefined snippets that make static content changes easy, (and of course code syntax highlighting!).
What tools are you using now?
Also remember that you are asking on a coding-site. Not many here would opt to use the WordPress editor over simply editing html-files. In fact, I dare to say many here carries a deep grudge after having to work around some specific quirks in the WP editor (aka tinyMCE).
Sure, you could replicate the layouts.
Sure, your content would be editable with just a form.
It would take a lot of effort, but certainly doable.
A local nonprofit needs a new website. It's a very basic website that simply presents information, nothing past basic HTML/CSS is needed to make the actual site.
The marketing manager would like to be able to edit text sections (upcoming events, jobs) regularly. How would I go about creating the site in HTML/CSS and then allowing them to edit just the text in those sections in an easy way? is that even possible, or would this require more advanced knowledge of actual programming/database languages?
Thanks
No, you can't edit the site with just HTML and CSS. Even if you have JavaScript, you'll need server side code (ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Node.js etc) to store the changed text, since HTML, CSS, and JS run on the client (excluding server side JavaScript based frameworks).
The easy solution is to just use simple HTML and tell him to directly edit the HTML. If he's just a little bit technical, an hour or two of explanation of how HTML works might be enough to get you going.
A CMS solution that is prebuilt and has simple menus for editing things might work nicely. There's plenty of various options to suit your needs.
Otherwise, you can either build a custom site. A custom site that reads text from simple text files might be all it takes (Markdown might be preferable to plain text.) Of course, you can scale it up if you want until you've basically built your own CMS.
You can't do that.
HTML pages are stored on a server (which is just a computer accessible by other computers via an internet connection), when you type in an address in your browser's address bar it sends a request to a server to fetch the corresponding HTML page. Then this page is displayed in your browser.
Now, say you managed to change a text in your browser somehow using HTML/CSS, but you still need to find a way to send these changes back to the server so that these updated pages are accessible by other remote browsers, and the only way of doing this is to use server side languages. They are not really that difficult, you can quickly learn that.
You might like to take a look at this sourceforge project.
This is a file-based system that uses conventional HTML for the webpages, but allows online editing with CKEditor. Requirements are Apache 2 and php 5.3 or later.
There is a testdrive available.
Login with guest.
I'm building a small-scale website (a personal one) in which each page would have the same set of header elements (I'm not talking about the <head> element). In other words, I want each page to have essentially the same title at the top of the page and the same navigation bar below that (with possibly minor differences in each page). It's kind of like how StackOverflow has that navigation bar (with the logo, and the Questions, Tags, etc. buttons) on the top of every page.
Is it possible create such a header for every web page without copying and pasting the HTML code to do so? I really don't want to run into a situation where if I want to make a single change, I would have to change all of my pages containing the header.
Real web sites use real web frameworks, which have a concept called a "layout" (at least that's what they're called in Rails; as mentioned in Uwe's answer, they're called master pages in ASP.NET). All the common "templatey" stuff goes into a layout.
How about include files in a server-side language like PHP or master pages in ASP.NET?
You need to use some kind of dynamic page processing, whether it's PHP, a server-side include, or a similar tool.
If you need to stick with straight HTML, you could try to rig something up with AJAX or JavaScript - but then you highly limiting your website's functionality, giving it serious performance issues, AND preventing users who have JavaScript disabled from using your website.
A third answer is to use some sort of pre-deployment tool. This used to be a bigger market, but I think it's mostly dried up now. Here's an example for using DreamWeaver to handle this.
If you have a PHP server that supports PHP,
<?php include 'header_inc.php'; ?>
If that's not available
<!--#include virtual="header_inc.html" -->
But whether this works or not is server dependent
If you have a server with PHP capabilities
include 'header.inc.php';
you must put the header code in a file named that and then put that include code in all pages that you want the header to show up on
I know that with a large site you would want to separate footers, menus, etc so that updating that file would push the update out to every page that contains the item.
Is the same recommended for a small site made purely in HTML/CSS, or is it simpler/easier/standard to code out the menu in each page and update each page when a change is needed?
I don't necessarily want to bring in PHP or etc onto this website, but the ease of updating menus would be nice. Any other suggestions? I've heard Server Side Includes might be one option... is that considered "pure html" or is more required to be set up on the server?
Thanks!
Unless you've got a site consisting of one page, do yourself a favor and have some separate files with your header/footer/other repeated elements.
That way you only have to make one change and its done. No matter how meticulous you think you are, you will inevitably forget a page somewhere on an update any other way. Its a human thing.
If its "just" HTML, and you're not using a server-side language, then you are correct in that you'll want to use server side includes. Check with your host to see if it will process SSI on regular *.htm/*.html files or if you need to use the *.shtm/*.shtml extension.
Server side includes isn't html, but it's not really coding either. It's probably your best option if you don't want to get PHP or some other coding solution involved.
It's mainly just a function of the webserver that you are using, and whether it's enabled for the site.
Here's a tutorial on them for Apache.
Here's documentation for IIS.
There are tons of different ways to approach this problem, but ultimately if you want to make changes on your side and have them reflected in lots of pages you're going to have to have either some kind of server side processing, which means PHP or JSP or something along those lines, or you're going to have to have some sort of process that generates your site statically updating lots of repeated items wherever they occur, but ultimately that would just be a compile time solution that's equivalent to some other server side approach.
If you're comfortable working in Java / JSP, then simple JSP includes might do everything you need. If they don't, then you could go for a full blown Portlets API application. I'm sure other languages have equally valid approaches, so ultimately its decideding what you're most comfortable with.
Server side includes would be "pure HTML" from the browser's standpoint, but then so would PHP.
If you didn't want to Server Side Includes, you could dynamically build them using JavaScript or a library such as jQuery, and just include a .js file in each of your pages.
If it's really small / mostly text-based content, you could just have one page with hidden DIVs that are switched in. Then it'll also be very snappy and self-contained if someone wants to view it offline.
It is very easy to do this with php. This is some sample index.php page i've built:
http://pastebay.com/51887
And for example in "includes/navigation.php" i have this:
http://pastebay.com/51888
So in everypage you have just put that from first link and when you want to edit navigation, just edit "includes/navigation.php". :)