I’ve been doing some massive geek-outery at work again. It’s some really cool stuff involving doing the navigation for a huge website using server side includes and variables so that I only have to write something once and it’ll look different depending on where you are in the site.
I think it’s cool anyway.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t seem to share my opinion. It’s kind of disheartening to get conversationally slapped down when I try to explain how it all works. On the other hand, the code is nifty and useful and I might as well post it here on the off chance that there’s someone else out there looking to do something similar.
First problem: doing server side includes without knowing the full directory path.
Solution: use a variable to trick the parsed file into calling images and so on from the correct folder
Example:
<!-- ### set global variable ### -->
<!--#set var="URLPREFIX" value="." --><script type="text/javascript" SRC="<!--#echo var="URLPREFIX" -->/include/navigation_script.js">
</script>
Second problem: the navigation needs to look different depending on where you are
Solution: set a variable before you call the navigation. Use if/then/else statements inside the navigation to change the code.
Example:
In the page that calls the navigation
<!--#set var="RESEARCHON" value="true" -->
<!--#include virtual="${URLPREFIX}/include/navigation.shtml" -->
and in the navigation itself
<a href="<!--#echo var="URLPREFIX"-->/research/research.shtml">
<!--#if expr="${RESEARCHON}" -->
<img name="research" src="<!--#echo var="URLPREFIX" -->/images/research-on.gif" border="0" alt="">
<!--#else -->
<img name="research" src="<!--#echo var="URLPREFIX" -->/images/research.gif" border="0" alt="">
<!--#endif -->
</a>
Note: code has been updated with spaces in front of the --> tags so that it’ll play nice with Apache 1.3.