Maintaining Features Throughout Site

[Skrying]

Sorry for the crappy thread title, I wasnt really sure how I should word it.

I've designing my first website and its fairly basic, I'm using a table layout because I've had good success with it so far and its been the easiest way for me to make a good looking and clean site.

My only issue is that I have multiple pages and I'd like to keep the top menu across all of the pages, without having to individually update each page myself each time a change is made to the top menu.

So my question is, is this possible? If so how so? Is such a feature built into Dreamweaver? A plug in?

Any advice is extremelly appericated, and if you have any questions by what I mean, I'd be glad to answer.

Thanks very much.

 

[BillLeeLee]

One possibility is to use server side includes, so that on each HTML page you basically include another file as the page is being served to the user, and this way you can keep just one html file for a header/footer/whatever, and include it on every page you want to have that thing.

Of course, the webhost has to have SSI enabled on the server, so you'll have to check if your host allows it.

Basic SSI tutorial (for Apache):
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html

Perhaps Dreamweaver has a mass update feature, but I don't use it so I really don't know. I wrote a simple perl program to maintain headers in the case that I don't use SSI.

 

[Skrying]

My host does not have SSI enabled.

I'll search around Dreamweaver to see if it has a mass update feature, I'm very new to it and any web mastering for that matter at all.

Thanks for your help.

 

[BillLeeLee]

Are you allowed any kind of server-side scripting, like PHP? You can do the PHP alternative to including files, mainly require

<?
require("header.html");
?>

 

[Skrying]

Yes, I can use PHP

 

[O[H]-Zone]

If you have Dreamweaver, use a template.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1059184&highlight=template

 

[Skrying]

If you have Dreamweaver, use a template.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1059184&highlight=template

Wow, thanks for that link. Never thought of such a thing, I was eyeballing the ability to create my own template but did not know if it was update itself when I changed it across all the pages.

Thanks

 

[O[H]-Zone]

No problem...it's an easy way to do exactly what you want.

 

[Skrying]

No problem...it's an easy way to do exactly what you want.

Yep. I switched all of the pages over to using the template and it worked perfectly.

Thanks agin.