I’m a relative newbie to web development. I know my HTML and CSS, and am getting involved with Ruby on Rails for some other projects, which has been daunting but very rewarding.
Basically I’m wondering if there’s a language/backbone/program/solution to eliminate the copypasta trivialities of HTML, with some caveats. Currently my website is hosted on a school server and unfortunately can’t use Rails. Being a newbie I also don’t really know what other technologies are available to me (or even what those technologies might be). I’m essentially looking for a way to auto-insert all of my header/sidebar/footer/menu information, and when those need to be updated, the rest of the pages get updated. Right now, I have a sidebar that is a tree of all of the pages on my website. When I add a page, not only do I need to update the sidebar, I have to update it for every page in my domain. This is really inefficient and I’m wondering if there is a better way.
I imagine this is a pretty widespread problem, but searching Google turns up too many irrelevant links (design template websites, tutorials, etc.). I’d appreciate any help.
Oh, and I’ve heard of HAML as a way to render HTML; how would it be used in this situation?
Server Side Includes.
Old as time. Supported in most hosting situations. Often forgotten in favour of hugely overcomplicated templating systems. SSI still has a place.