Using FrontPage webbot for Page Includes

Although I don't normally recommend FrontPage webbots as they tend to rely on FrontPage Extensions on the web server, and they are also proprietary, there is one however which I use frequently.

 It allows you to automatically modify common parts of a web page and it doesn't rely on FrontPage Extensions as it.

Web Pages can contain common elements typical examples are tracking scripts, Google Adsense ,Navigation.

The problem arises when we need to make changes to these common elements. So if you have a navigational block consisting of:

Home,contact,sales

and wanted to change it to

home,contact,products,sales

You would need to change each page which of course is time consuming and tedious. There is however a very useful feature in FrontPage which allows you to enter pages into web pages ( merge or include pages).

The way it works is that you create a page for the navigation and include this page in all the other pages. To change the navigation you will need to update the navigation page and FrontPage will automatically update the pages that use it.

Once done you will then need to upload these pages to your website.

The procedure is:

1.Insert >select web component

2.Select included content in the left pane, and page in the right pane

3.Select the page to be included

Notes:

Give the included page a number prefix so that they appear together and are listed first.

Resources:

• Using PHP for Site Navigation
• Adding Repetitive Content Using PHP
• Handling Repetitive Content