Question

I need to take an existing website and place it as a subdirectory of another existing website. For example, I have http://www.website1.com and http://www.website2.com and I need to put website2 in website1 like this: http://www.website1.com/website2/. It should be noted I’m using IIS to host these websites.

I’ve actually run into this multiple times and I was wondering if there was a good way to write my links so I could easily drop a website anywhere and not have to reformat every link. I use two main paths – one for my root, and one for an includes folder outside my root. My first thought was to have two path variables in PHP for these paths, but then it couldn’t go in my external js and css files. I don’t want to turn those into php files if I can help it because of the caching complications that creates.

Anyway, does anyone else have a good solution for this? How have you handled it in the past?

Answer 1

Here’s what I ended up doing:

For the items under my root directory, I used pure relative paths. So for example, when I access an image in my image folder, the link depends on how deep the page I’m on in the directory structure is:

<img src='./images/myImg.png'/> <!-- in root dir -->
<img src='../images/myImg.png'/> <!-- 2 levels deep -->
<img src='../../images/myImg.png'/> <!-- 3 levels deep -->

This is not ideal as I have to think about where every link is in relation to the file I’m in and if I change the location of the images folder or the file, I need to change every link. The positive though is as long as I don’t start changing my directory structure, I can place this folder at any level and it will work without change. For example, I can do:

www.website2.com
www.website1.com/website2/
www.website1.com/sub-directory/website2/

And it works without any changes to the links.

For the items in my includes folder that is outside the root folder, I had to do it a little differently. For those, I used relative links in PHP, which I learned more about here http://yagudaev.com/posts/resolving-php-relative-path-problem/. He describes a few different options, but in the end, I created a global variable like thus:

$includesPath = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/../myProductsIncludes/";

This will look for the includes folder in the same folder as the root folder. If I need to adjust the location of the includes folder, I just change the link in this one variable. Then whenever I write a url to a file in the includes folder, I prepend the global var, like this:

include $includesPath . "classes/myClass.php";

This is all rather elementary stuff, and has some drawbacks so I wouldn’t use it for every project, but it works great if I have a project that I don’t know where it will end up in a directory structure (for example, if I’m contracting for a client). So for example, if I’m giving this to a client, he can drop the contents of my root folder into any subdirectory on his website and place the includes folder in the same folder as the root of his website (or just change that one variable if he wants to store it somewhere else), and it all works without changing a link.

If anyone has a different way of doing this, or any improvements to my way, I’d love to hear.