A client wanted me to take their existing web site and add a content-management system (CMS) and a members-only area.<\/p>\n
The site was made with Dreamweaver templates, which helped enforce some consistency. Unfortunately, the navigation was different on every single page. I think this was done so that pages within a section could show an expanded sub-navigation list. It also allowed every page’s corresponding navigation link to not be a link (i.e., be “selected” and not clickable.)<\/p>\n
I decided to throw away the Dreamweaver templates and enforce my own consistency across the site, including the navigation. I knew I could write a getNavigation() function that could work on any<\/em> page, and still handle the subnav and selected states.<\/p>\n The site had been made with table-based layouts, so I whipped up a quick grid using OOCSS that approximated the old site and used that for my new PHP template, along with the getNavigation function.<\/p>\n I converted the first file by hand to get a feel for how the work would go, and it probably took me 30 minutes. The next two or three went a little faster, and after a dozen, I was able to convert a page in about a minute. (I considered writing a script to do it for me, but that would have taken nearly as long, and I would not have the advantage of becoming familiar with each page on the site.)<\/p>\n I started keeping track of new page names in an apache .httaccess file. I wanted to redirect the old .html pages to the new .php pages with a 301 HTTP status code so that bookmarks and search rankings would not be adversely affected. Since the new pages could be called anything I wanted, I ended up just leaving the file name and changing the extension. The list began to grow, and I realized there should be a way to bulk-redirect these files. I knew Apache’s mod_rewrite could do it, but I didn’t remember whether rewriting was the same as redirecting with a 301. I found out that you can send a status code as you rewrite, so I deleted the long list and used a couple of RewriteRules instead.<\/p>\n That’s my progress so far, and you can hire me to do this for your web site as well. Contact me at the Boulder Information Services<\/a> web site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A client wanted me to take their existing web site and add a content-management system (CMS) and a members-only area. The site was made with Dreamweaver templates, which helped enforce some consistency. Unfortunately, the navigation was different on every single … Continue reading