Ready to consider PHP in lieu of iframes---need advice

Okay, I'm not satisfied with iframes on one of my sites, so I'm considering PHP. Could someone please take a look at my site and tell me if PHP would work in this instance?

Question, part II: Is there a book you can recommend for a php illiterate like myself?

Question part III: I have Fantastico with my hosting, and it has an option for a PHP web site. They don't really support fantastico features, so I'm not sure what to do or how to do it. I don't know how installing this feature on my site will effect everything as it stands now.

By installing the PHP site script via Fantastico, will my site (as it stands right now) break?

And finally: I have Dreamweaver MX and don't know how to use it. But I understand that it can do some PHP stuff FOR me??

HEEEEELP! haha. Seriously. Help.

If you guys could take a peek at my site http://www.autumnwhisperstome.com and let me know if php can be used and retain the look/setup of the pages, etc. that would be awesome.

What I want is to have the content on the page change without having to navigate to another page (hence the iframes).

Thanks in advance.

I'm not entirely sure if you understand what PHP is. PHP (like ASP, perl, JSP) is a server side language that dynamically creates HTML files. So let's say that you want a page to always display the correct date and time - you could get PHP to do that so that whenever someone views a page, the date and time show up.

You want to have content on thepage change without having to navigate to another page? You're going to have to elaborate. This is basically impossible - frames won't do this as *part* of the page still changes. If you mean you don't want the user to be able to see the page they're on in the address bar, then why not? If you just want to prevent your navigation dissapearing, then please, forget it, because billions of web pages don't use frames and are used every day.

I apologise if I've misunderstood anything here... but what exactly are you trying to accomplish with the above in mind?

A lot of people use frames so that they don't have to redo the navigation every update and such. If this is one of the reasons you don't want the page to change then use SSI. It works great!

Okay, I'm most likely not understanding PHP at all. But this is what I want to happen....

I want the contents of the page to change, but not the page itself. I like the sites I've visited that have this effect. It's like, as stupid as it sounds, the contents magically appear when a link is clicked. lol Okay, so don't throw rotten tomatoes just yet. :P

Also, there's a sound file on the main page, and I want it to play initially, and also if visitors leave and come back, but I don't want them to have to deal with it each time they click on an internal link and come back. You know?

John: that's definitely a plus to having just one page to update, but I also just like the idea of not flipping from one page to another... yeah, that sounds goofy, I know. :P I'm not familiar with SSI.

I assume you mean like we have here - all the threads works from viewtopic.php?
You can do that with a cookie. If the sound file is in Flash then it's better to use a Flash cookie

I know there's a code to make the music play only once and never again, but I don't want that to happen. Is this cookie going to do that?

Also, I realize with some browsers even flash cookies are blocked. I had to change FF's default settings to allow Flash movies to play. There's a lot of anti-spyware, antivirus programs that block active content... so I'm not sure I want to mess with that yet.

I need to give this some thought.

A cookie would remember if the music has been played already and not play it again if it has... I'm not sure what else you want to accomplish!

I have a few sites that use a feature called PHP includes.

What you basically do is create a file, can be .html, .txt, .php, whatever. In this file you stick some code that you want to show up on every page of your site. (it's often used with navigation bars).

Then, you put a little bit of php code on every page, this code "requests" the code you put inside that first file I mentioned and simply sticks it inline.

For example:

I have a file called inc_navigation.html. In this file I have nothing except:

Code: Select all

Home Page About Us etc etc.

(NOTE: this little file doesn't have <html>, <body> tags. It simply has the code above)

Then, I put this particular line of code in ALL my other pages:

Code: Select all

<?php require("inc_navigation.html"); ?>

Later in life, when I want to change the navigation bar contents, but I REALLY don't want to do it on all 70 of my pages, I simply change the contents of "inc_navigation.html" and upload it to the web host.

It instantly changes on all pages across the site that happen to have the PHP code listed above.

Some people may wonder, so I'll say it now: The particular snippet of PHP code I listed above should be placed exactly where you want the navigation bar (in this example) to show up in the regular pages, not in the head tag.

Here's a real life example of how I've used this feature in a large current project:

Code: Select all

<div id="left"> [img]images/index_cassandra_tiara.jpg[/img]
    <p id="topsellercaption">[img]site_img/green_arrow_bullet.gif[/img] Top Seller: Cassandra Tiara</p>
    <?php require("includes/inc_sub_wedplan.html"); ?>
    <?php require("includes/inc_newsletters_large.html"); ?>
  </div>

That above code uses two PHP includes and can be seen here: http://bostonwebstudio.com/client/usabride/new/

It makes the entire left pink column.

Herkalees... THANK you! A lightbulb FINALLY went on about php because of your tutorial!

I copied and pasted the post so I can use it later for reference. That SO sounds a lot easier than having to change all those pages.

could you mean like id's(sorry dont know the real names, what are they called?) like when you click a link and you get page.php?pageid=3 ?? so your veiwing the same page but seeing diffent content that. lol

No.. it's like frames, where the content changes within the page without having to switch pages to do it. Not links, but content.. like text.

You're welcome, glad I could help.