Better web menus

[yesthattom]

I’m doing updates on www.NJLGC.org and every time I add a new sub-menu on the left, I have tons of editing to do. I am using include files, so at least I don’t have to touch every single page.

Anyway...

Does anyone know of a good tools for automatically generating these menus? There has to be something better than manually edited include files. I’m sure I could whip up something in perl, but I’d rather re-use something that already exists.

Comments

[clauclauclaudia]

HTML error in your post. ;-)

No idea, I'm afraid. I assumed everyone used frames for that these days.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Fixed. Thanks for spotting that!

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

I don't really know of anything, sorry. You could use a simple csv file for all your links, and then use a script to template it up with the HTML, but that will only be marginally easier than using an editor with good copy/paste functionality. You could approximate this by using nexted includes as well - set a couple variables and then include a file that echos those inside the HMTL. It won't really save you any code, but is a tiny bit easier on the copy/pasting. It's more useful when you have to use those values multipel times, though (such as in an Amazon affiliate link).

Probably not what you want

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

but Macromedia Dreamweaver is designed to handle this kind of thing. Its site management lets you generate templates with included content. When you update the content, it goes out and updates all the pages to work.

The point is that you keep the pages in an editing space and periodically upload them when you're ready. the pages themselves are just regular HTML, without includes or other script tricks to get the menus. Dreamweaver puts in HTML comments that it uses to keep you from editing the template parts in Dreamweaver.

Re: Probably not what you want

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Ok. I think the site used to be edited with DW, but when I inherited it I, obviously, started using "vi".

Know anyone that would like to take over editing the site? They only request a change or two each month.