Colonel Boris

Cracked it! Just needed the following lines in the .htaccess file AddHandler cgi-script .html SetEnv PHP_EXTENSION .html And that was that - the lines every other website had for adding to the .htaccess file tended to bork the whole thing... I know, I know, I'm a noob... edit: I found a way around the file path thing for PHP: http://gr0w.com/articles/code/php_include_file_path_finder/ Very neat and saves a lot of messing about for me.

Thanks, Bocaj. I think what I'd like to do is to get html processed as php (all the files are pretty small anyway). I tried this by adding in a .htaccess file, but now it gives a "do you want to open or save this file" when I look at the page: http://www.tonykeenebirds.co.uk/beta/index.html I've heard of this happening before, but I couldn't find a way to fix this. Any ideas? Cheers, Tony

Evenin' all, After many adventures (including hard drive failures and other fun stuff), I've finally managed to move the website to another company's hosting. Hurrah. Now I can use PHP and the test seems to be working well. I wondered about where to put the PHP file for the menu and I'd had the files in the /beta/ folder on my site, along with the webpages I was using to test them with. All seems to work well and continues to do so even when I moved the php files to a different directory without adding the full path to the files in the webpage. In fact, when I wrote out the full path to the php file, it borked and wouldn't work at all. Can you really just tell a page to call up ("menu.php") without having to specify the exact location of the php file on the server? Cheers! Tony edit: also, if I change my index file from an .html to a .php, how do I convince search engines of this so a search doesn't lead to a defunct page?

Ta! I'll get round to sprucing it up a bit eventually. Everyone was very helpful here regarding using php for a menu, so there's hope for me yet.

Don't think I'm in any danger of that... www.tonykeenebirds.co.uk [/newbie]

Turns out my hosting won't allow PHP. Ah well, not to worry - I've been thinking of moving the site for a while now, anyway...

Woo! Thanks very much! The only mildly depressing thing is that I read nearly every single tutorial page on tizag and gave up just before hitting php... I'll let you know how I get on. Cheers! Tony

Thanks, everyone!

Ah, makes me think of my short-lived web comic... Dr Fahrquit, Ph. D I ran out of science jokes after that...

Hi, I've been searching for a few answers on web design and kkeep coming back to here, so thought I'd join up. I'm pretty much a novice at this - I run a rather basic site (my birding site), but hopefully it'll get better... Cheers, Tony

Evenin' all, I'm a newbie on this forum and my skills are somewhat lacking when it comes to web design. I did a search on the problem I'm having, but didn't seem to get quite the ideas I was looking for, so please don't flame me too heavily if I've asked a really basic question. I'd like to update my site a bit (http://www.tonykeenebirds.co.uk) in that I'd like to have a menu down the side that doesn't require a) frames and for me to manually update 200 pages each time I want to add a section. Any ideas how to do this? I've seen with CSS 'frames' that it's much friendlier than the bog-standard frames, but, as far as I can tell, it still requires each page to be updated. I had a look at XML/XSLT, but couldn't see how to get the data into the side of the page and in the right format. Any help would be greatly appreciated! So far, my experience of web design extends to the site mentioned above and, as basic as that is, it's a marked improvement over my old-style site (of which there are still some remnants on there that I haven't updated yet). As an amatuer bird spotter with a family and a job as a research chemist, I haven't had that much time to learn web design too thoroughly... Cheers! Tony