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Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 14:39:11 -0700
From: Shannon Brooks <shannon@sitecraft.net>
To: Multiple recipients of CorralTalk <corraltalk@lassosmart.com>
Subject: my experience with includes and site structure, etc....
Status: R


We (various co-workers and myself of the last 5-6 years) have been 
using a similar system for site design and structure for sites on 
unix platforms with server side includes. This does not have the 
luxury of defining variables or parsing the file path from the url, 
but we use it for the structure of each sections of the site, with 
global includes and local includes. The site content and structure 
reside on the same page, and server side includes provide the 
navigation, other section specific, and site wide includes.

So a site looks like this

/public_html
	index.html
	/images
	/includes
		nav
		styles
		metatags
		footer
		sectionone_header
		search
	/section_one
		/includes
			section_nav
			metatags
		/images
	/section_two

etc....

Once we started working in Lasso, this design carried over into the 
lasso world of includes.

We used this same method in structuring the lasso sites:

/sitedirectory
	index.lasso
	/images
	/includes
		session.inc
		header.inc
		footer.inc
		authentication.inc
		etc..
		nextprev.inc
	login.lasso
	etc....


This method works well when we work with regular site designers, who 
give us separate pages - that we can simply drop these includes into.

[include:'/includes/session.inc']

at the top of every page - for example - sets or reads user tracking 
cookies and writes useful information to the database. It is easy for 
non-lasso programmers to maintain the html.

One of the things that I tired to do with one client was to preserve 
the relationship between the page name that was displayed in the 
location bar to an actual html page in the directory. This allowed 
the client to make changes whenever, and the lasso code that 
supported the page was in an entirely different file that the client 
never touched.

addtocart.lasso was a bunch of processes and conditionals. On an 
error I used a redirect to bring up the error page - and the location 
bar displayed carterror.lasso. But if all went well, they would 
redirect to shoppingcart.lasso, and the display was included from 
shoppingcart.html.

I am in the process of creating a site as outlined in the spec. In 
particular I want to see how I can preserve this illusion of the page 
name in the location bar relating to an actual file the client can 
find and modify the content of.

One of the things that I have questions about that I am sure will 
become more apparent as I try to get a working model up, is how to 
deal with navigation rollovers and section specific navigation 
highlighting. Also - some of the designs I get handed are monsters of 
nested tables with beautiful rollovers etc.... I remember something 
in the list about conditional javascripts related to this, and I am 
interested in discussing it more. I am not the most gifted of 
javasript programmers, and I rely heavily on Image Ready for rollover 
code.

Looking forward to late nights.......

Shannon



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