| How
can I use PHP code if my pages end in .HTML?
One
of the biggest challenges when upgrading
the functionality of a website is changing
all of the page names.
For
example, if you have a site that has pages
that end in .html or .htm, this means that
you usually don't have the ability to use
some of the time-saving features of php
scripting. For example, the navigation can't
be placed in a separate file that you can
update everything in one area (vs. having
to edit each and every page of the site).
Or, you couldn't pull off last week's tip...
personalizing a site based on geographic
location.
Most
web developers will tell you that in order
to use php, you need to change all of your
file names to .php. So
the about.html page would change to about.php.
 It's
painful to rename all of your pages
This
is less than ideal for many reasons.
Why?
First, you may have lots and lots of links
inside your site that would then need to
be changed, often one at a time,
in order to prevent broken links.
Second,
other websites may be linking to one or
more pages of your site,
and changing the navigation can cause you
to lose the value of inbound links, both
from a traffic perspective and a search
engine popularity perspective.
Third,
many search engines may have already indexed
your site successfully. If you
change all of the page names, a search engine
will then have to re-index all of your content,
and you risk losing position.
While
there are ways to use 301 redirects to make
sure that the old page name will automatically
forward to the new page name, but for a
website with many pages, this can be a long
and painful process.
The
Work-Around
One
way to work around the limitation of php
scripting is to essentially tell your server
that an HTML page (i.e. a page ending in
.html or .htm) should be treated just like
a page that ends in .php.
The
way to accomplish this is fairly technical,
but if you have an Apache-based Web server,
you can modify the .htaccess file on the
server:
Add
this line into the .htaccess file:
The
.htaccess file is generally where the error
404 handling is set up for your site:
Then,
you can add php code into your .html pages,
such as:
And
it should work properly!
Summary:
There
is a way to trick your webserver to think
an HTML page can run php scripting, allowing
you to add interactive features, but not
have change all of the names of your pages. |
