Glom Posted April 20, 2006 Share Posted April 20, 2006 My website consists of a bunch of pages following a standard template. With css, changes to styles are done easily enough. But if I wanted to change the layout of the pages, at present, I would need to update each page individually. Is there a way to write the template so that it accepts layout information from an external source like a stylesheet so that all pages can be updated with just one edit? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aspnetguy Posted April 20, 2006 Share Posted April 20, 2006 You could use a serverside language to pull in the template and then fill in the content from a databse. That way each page is pulling int he same template so any changes to the template file would be site wide.This would take a bit of planning. I can give you some pointers if you want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glom Posted April 20, 2006 Author Share Posted April 20, 2006 You could use a serverside language to pull in the template and then fill in the content from a databse. That way each page is pulling int he same template so any changes to the template file would be site wide.This would take a bit of planning. I can give you some pointers if you want.<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Ooh. Sounds complicated. Pointers would be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aspnetguy Posted April 20, 2006 Share Posted April 20, 2006 First of all you need a database. Our table will be called PagesPageIdPageTitleText1Text2We'll keep it small to keep it simple for now.Then in your website folder we would create a templates folder. Inside the templates folder we would put templates.Templates are just the HTML/CSS that make up the layout except we would have to put in Identity Tags to let our code know where to put the text ...<div class="MainText">{TEXTBOX1}</div>... Then in the Server Side code(SSC) we would open and read the contents of the template file (you can have .txt, .html, or whatever extension you want) in a variable. Then we would search the variable until we found an IDENTITY tag (ie {TEXTBOX1}) and then replace it witht he value of Text1 we had retreived formt he database.Once we have searched the variable for all indentity tags we can then write the varible to the screen.I am not sure if I explained it well but that is the basic idea Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xmfClick Posted April 20, 2006 Share Posted April 20, 2006 Another option, if the site is basically static, is to store the template-y bits in INCLUDE files and INCLUDE them in your content-y pages. So, if you had a standard header and footer, your average content page would look something like this:-<html><#include file="inc_header.html"><h1>Welcome to JelloFreaks.com!</h1><p>blah blah blah</p><#include file="inc_footer.html"></html>Then you just need to change the header or footer INCLUDE file and Viola! (as they say), your whole site is changed. Whether you can do this or not depends on your server, however, so you'd need to do a little research. Ask your hosting service, and Google around a bit. Much easier than writing code, though regarded as a little old-fashioned (but what's wrong with that?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glom Posted April 23, 2006 Author Share Posted April 23, 2006 Thanks for the replies. Looks like I might need to develop my w3 skills before I could properly do it. I'll list this as a long term goal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johneva Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 Thanks for the replies. Looks like I might need to develop my w3 skills before I could properly do it. I'll list this as a long term goal.<{POST_SNAPBACK}> The other two options are better for certain things but another option is if you use Dreamweaver you can use the Dreamweaver template files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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