Alternative to frames

^whitey^

I want to rid my site (below) of frames and since the site is in drastic need of a makeover & i've recently purchased web space now is the time to do it.

Now the first thing I tried after googling for hours was to use SSI which seemed promising but now after throwing two pages together using SSI im after realising its not the correct solution.

The reason I used frames in the first place was that one frame had a table of contents and another the contents themselves. This reduced the amount of redundant code hugely and made updating easy of course it also had all the bad attributes of frames.

I need a sloution that will enable me to chop my page into "frames" some of which are static (i.e menu or table of contents) and then a "frame" that holds the content.

The reason SSI and tables didn't solve my scenario is that I can't click on a menu item in the menu table and then get it to change the content in the content table (which frames can do with frames) without writing a seperate page for the new content which has all the include commands for the header, footer and menu. Which seems like alot of redundant code to me.

The only thing I can think of right now is to use a mixture or frames and SSI which will be crap because of the frame component.

Vazelothir

might be a really stupid suggestion, but have you thought about iframes?

Alternately try php includes - i.e. define a header page then call it in as appropriate..

^whitey^

I thought Iframes have the same bad attributes as frames?

PHP includes seem to do the same job as SSI i.e. I still have to make the call everytime I need the header (I could be wrong). Where as I would like to have a header static and not have to call it everytime I need it which is what frames do.

Rollo Tamasi

^whitey^ wrote:

The reason SSI and tables didn't solve my scenario is that I can't click on a menu item in the menu table and then get it to change the content in the content table (which frames can do with frames) without writing a seperate page for the new content which has all the include commands for the header, footer and menu. Which seems like alot of redundant code to me.

mmmmmm, don't see the problem with using tables. Redudant code isn't an excuse at all really.

^whitey^

Id prefer not to have redundant code as it wastes time both in maintaining the site and writing pages and in loading the page (albeit this is micro seconds), if I want to change the code that isnt covered under the includes I have to change every page.

I suppose im also fussy and just want to make it as efficient as possible.

Rollo Tamasi

so create a table which has an includes in it which retrives its links from a database
http://www.tutorialstream.com/tutorials/php-mysql/database_driven_menu.php

louie

using includes is one of the best part of web design.
one page could have all functions in it called whenever need it.
you need a new function ad it there and use it when you want.

That will not put too much load on the server and it will be easier to maintain then frames.

did you ever tried to see how google spiders frames?

mewso

Actually I think using masterpages is superior to includes. Unfortunately it's only an option in .net although I wouldn't be surprised if other techs have similar ideas knocking around. The idea is you have a template page (the masterpage) and you specify parts of that page to be containers for content then you just have a setting on every other page that tells it to use that masterpage and place content in each page that will be inserted into the defined content sections. It's almost like page inheritance and even though I haven't explained it well it works like a dream.
The advantage is that you only ever have to change the masterpage to change the whole site which is similar to includes but if you wanted to change where different includes appeared on a page then changing the whole site would be necessary not so with masterpages.

^whitey^

Thanks for the replies guys.

I think i'll press ahead with SSI it'll be a bit more work then I thought but should work out in the end.

If it doesnt, i'll look into masterpages they sound interesting.

Cheers.

The Dump

The strokes?

democrates

Definitely php includes. All each page needs is one line at the top to include the header and one at the bottom for the footer, slam dunk.

If you want to avoid even having to do that, check out the auto_prepend_file and auto_append_file directives. That way you don't even need any include lines in your php files, the web server does it automatically for you.

If the menu is required in every page can that not be part of the header?