Using PHP for every page

[tox0tes]

Is there a downside to making all pages end in .php? Is it harder for robots to crawl? I am thinking of doing this because of how easy it is to make separate files for the header and footer so that I don't have to update every page when changing a link or copyright.

[BGarner]

I don't think there's a down side since php includes just insert the code before the browser even sees it. Check out this article on php includes (and the link to the continuation of that article at the end of the page).

[tox0tes]

That's what I thought - I have been using .shtml for a long time because it does basically the same thing... but I'm going to start using PHP

[grahame]

My main site has all its pages served via PHP. A couple of thoughts ....

a) If you use a .htm or .html extension for pages that are "naturally unchanging", any human who views / types the URL will be given the confidence that he / she is going to a nice straightforward page and won't worry about what code he/ she is running

b) Watch carefully caching and storage headers. Many a browser will retain a truely static page (or image) for a while to save bandwidth, but unless you take specific action with headers, PHP will feed each time.

Note that with both of these issues that I refer to for a human visitor, intelligent robots can have the same issues / reach the same conclusions.

By the way - on a techincal note, we use apache mod_rewrite to wrap standard code around all of our pages in most directories, and we change the .html and .htm into PHP via the httpd configuration file.