I have a unique problem, which is proving difficult to solve using google. I am consolidating all of my javascript and css into separate php files, which use require_once() to pull the contents of the files in. The javascript file looks something like this:
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/javascript');
require_once('jquery.form.js');
require_once('jquery.jqtransform.js');
require_once('jquery.validate.js');
?>
My specific problem is that web browsers will 'see' that this is a dynamic page, because of the php file extension, and then request the content anew each time a page on the site is loaded. What I am trying to do is get the time of last request from the browser, and then check each file modification time to see if I really do need to send the file contents again. It is proving difficult to find the time of last request by the user. Also, I have not yet started to tackle the problem of finding the last modified date of the files that are included, so if there is information regarding finding the file details of a file on the server, that would also be appreciated.
Just to be clear, the reason I am doing this is because (I think) it takes advantage of the gzip compression better than individually gzipped files.
Thanks in advance
I wrote a series of posts about this issue specifically. See Supercharging Javascript in PHP and Supercharging CSS in PHP. These cover:
Combining files;
Gzipping best practices;
Caching best practices; and
Versioning output.
Your premise is incorrect. Browsers don't "see" the PHP file extension and decide not to cache things. See http://www.enhanceie.com/redir/?id=httpperf for information on how browsers really work.
You should set an ETAG on your response, and then you can simply check the If-None-Match request header and return a 304 if the content is unchanged.
Browsers don't determine if a page or a file is dynamic or static by its extension. Its headers do. Just set the proper headers so the browser knows it can cache the results.
Also, ditch the closing ?>. It's not required and is bad practice.
Alister Bulman just mentioned a neat library solution for this problem but placed it as a comment. I'm repeating his comment as an answer since I found it valuable:
Minify - code.google.com/p/minify - is a library designed to do what
is required here - concatenate the files and send the appropriate
headers, also trimming down the contents, and quite possibly gzipping
them, while caching the results on disk. – Alister Bulman Jan 10 '10
at 10:44
You can enable auto-gzipping of files using apache mod_deflate.
You can also use apache mod_rewrite to refer to these files in the html as js files and redirect the request to the php files, avoiding your server caching issues.
Something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*).js $1.php
Put this code in a .htaccess file in your directory.
Related
Please help me to understand how not to overcomplicate my site.
For example I have files:
index.php
other.php
etc...
these files have such code
include '../dir/index.php';
include '../dir/other.php';
etc.
How to have url like "site.com/news.php" without having actual file news.php, because only one thing it does is including code?
You have to configure your Apache to send all request to you main PHP script. You can do that via different ways. The "regular" way would be to use a .htaccess file and some mod_rewrite settings. Then within your main script you have to handle the problem of not finding the file which was requested. But be careful you can create a lot of security sink holes. For example if you just parse the request parameters and without sanitizing include a file.
For that you should just look at some modern PHP frameworks like Symfony, Laravel and others. There this kind of stuff is already handle quite well.
So I have a website with more than 10 pages. Now I want to export the head section, the header and the footer to other files, in order to facilitate further editing of any of those section, without having to go through every single page. Is it possible to make a header.html and have the other html files import the code from the separate file?
What you're describing is an "include" and here's how to do it with PHP. I recommend using a server side language like PHP to do the include because it will definitely be indexed by Google and you don't need to worry that the user has javascript disabled or poorly supported.
First of all, you won't be able to do this unless your webpages are either saved as PHP (with .php extension) or your HTML pages (.html extension) are being parsed by PHP. Obviously you'll also need PHP running on your server.
Take the chunks you want to "include" and save them into their own files (header.php, footer.php, etc.). Put them in their own folder under your assets area (such as a directory called includes or inc). Then, in your web pages, use PHP to include those files:
<?php include_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/include/header.php') ?>
I like to use the $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable so I don't need to remember the relative path to the include directory. Use that include line exactly where you would place the original header html.
If you want to keep your files as HTML but have them parsed as PHP, you'll need to make sure your server is parsing HTML files as PHP. You can direct the server to do this in the .htaccess (assuming Apache) where you'll need a line like this:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html
This line will be different for different host environments, so you may need to tweak that.
You could move your header and associated files to an html file and just call jQuery load to bring it in.
USAGE
http://api.jquery.com/load/
You can also use PHP to do a php include_once of your header.php file. This is similar to what wordpress does!
USAGE
http://php.net/manual/en/function.include-once.php
Good luck and let me know if theres other questions!
Yes, your problem is a general problem of preventing code duplication. As usual with general problems this problem was addressed a lot with a lot of different approaches over the years.
And there are more possible solutions, it would be a very hard task just to list all the possible solutions, so my answer will be very vague.
You can use the object tag to reuse your structure
You can load it with a client-side language, like Javascript (or using its very popular library, called jQuery)
Finally, you can generate your HTML using a server-side language
You can't do this with CSS. You can call those HTML contents from separated files using Ajax (it's pretty simple with jQuery) or you can directly include the files using PHP.
Does anybody know of a software program that will convert a website built with PHP, JSON and jquery into a mainly HTML format. We need to do a conversion for SEO purposes and don't want to have to rewrite the whole site.
HTML is a language used for markup, PHP is an object oriented functional language. You cannot convert one to the other, I'm sorry.
If you're trying to make sure that you have nothing but .HTML extensions on your public URLs for SEO purposes:
Someone's selling you a line of BS.
You need access to your server configuration.
You don't have to convert anything but your links.
The .PHP extension is the default file extension configured to be sent from Apache to the PHP engine for parsing. You can change what file extension gets parsed in your configuration file.
http://encodable.com/parse_html_files_as_php/
This will allow you to keep .HTM files static and have .HTML files parsed as if they were .PHP files.
Try this: http://www.httrack.com/
It will only return a static HTML site. But it might be a good base for you.
Since the only thing which really knows what type of file you're using is the server itself, it does not really matter what you're using on the back end. Most search engines are smart enough to know that so they don't really care so much. Now, people might care. People might say, "Hm, well, this is .html, that means that this person must have a flat file which is constantly being updated," but I doubt it.
If you're really concerned about having a .html extension, then you can fake it by using htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1.php [L]
If that is placed in a .htaccess file at the root of your site, it will redirect all requests which end with .html to a corresponding page with .php. It will do that transparently both to the user and to the crawlers.
Of course, every link on your site will need to convert from linking to .php, but it will replace the impossible task of using only .html files with the annoying task of replacing all of your .php links.
As to removing JavaScript, well, you could do that, or you could design your site in such a way that it still uses AJAX but it works with the search engines instead of against them. The biggest trick is to make sure that your site can work with as little AJAX as possible and then use AJAX to supplement. We've come a long way from requiring that all websites work in lynx, but it is still good practice to make sure that they are still sane without the benefit of JS/CSS.
Besides, search engines are getting smarter. Google has been working to read AJAX intelligently since 2009. But even if they weren't, there are plenty of articles out there on using AJAX without hurting SEO.
There is no need to nerf your site because of SEO -- You can have your AJAX and SEO too.
This is hard to accomplish if there is a lot of dynamic data. For a simple website you can just cache every page and make that your new website. I am not sure how useful that would be. For example if you have forms or other user input fields then things will just not work. In any case this is how you do it using wget.
$ wget -m http://www.example.com/
More reading here.
I have a big site with lots of .html files, and I want to start using PHP in my pages, but I don't want to change the links to .php . I read on Apache servers you can add a rule to the .htaccess file that will allow PHP parsing in plain .html files. Is this possible in IIS?
Absolutely. Assuming you're using IIS7, you simply change the request path in "Handler Mappings" to *.html (to handle all html files).
Note that you'll get a big performance hit though. It's much quicker to serve static content, so if you have lots of html pages every single one of them will start being parsed by PHP. It would be preferable to switch pages to .php as needed, but I understand that it would be tricky to fix all the backlinks.
More information about setting it up is available here.
Be aware that when changing handler mappings you'll also want to make sure it is still sending the correct MIME types. I just implemented the solution Hamish linked to, but all my CSS #import directives were failing, as they were to pure .css files which were now being served with PHP's standard text/html Content-type header.
I'm currently using PHP to include multiple css (or js) files into a single file (as well as compress the content using GZIP).
E.g. the HTML page calls resources like this...
<link rel="stylesheet" href="Concat.php?filetype=css&files=stylesheet1,stylesheet2,stylesheet3"></link>
<script src="Concat.php?filetype=js&files=script1,script2,script3"></script>
Example of my Concat.php file can be found here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3687270/Concat.php (feel free to comment on any problems with the code)
But instead of having to open up my command prompt and running YUI Compressor manually on my CSS/JS files I want the Concat.php file to handle this for at least the CSS side of things (I say CSS only because I appreciate that YUI Compressor does minification of variables and other optimisations so it isn't feasible to replicate in PHP - but that is part 2 of my question).
I know this can be done with some Regex magic and I haven't a problem doing that.
So, my question has 2 parts, which are:
1.) What is the performance implications of having the server minify using preg_replace on a CSS file (or set of CSS files that could have a few hundred lines of code per file - normally it would be a lot less but I'm thinking that if the server compresses the file then I wouldn't have to worry too much about extra whitespace in my CSS)
2.) And how can I get the JavaScript files that are concatenated via my Concat.php file run through YUI Compressor? Maybe run via the server (I have direct access to the server so I could install YUI Compressor there if necessary), but would this be a good idea? Surely optimising on the server everytime a page is requested will be slow and bad for the server + increase bandwidth etc.
The reason this has come up is that I'm constantly having to go back and make changes to existing 'compressed/minified' JS/CSS files which is a real pain because I need to grab the original source files, make changes then re-minify and upload. When really I'd rather just have to edit my files and let the server handle the minification.
Hope someone can help with this.
If your webserver is Apache, you should use mod_concat and let the Apache take care of compression using gzip,
http://code.google.com/p/modconcat/
You should minify the JS just once and save the minified version on servers.
As suggested in the comments you could use one of the pre-built scripts for that. They make use of YUI compressor as well as other solutions even if you can't run Java on the server.
The first one was probably PHP Speedy, which still works but has been abandoned.
A new one is Minify, which offers a lot of features including general caching solution depending on the server's capabilities (APC, Memcached, File cache).
Another advantage of these projects is that your URLs won't have query strings in them (contrary to your current method), which causes troubles in a lot of browsers when it comes to caching. They also take care of gzipping and handling Expires headers for your content.
So I definitely recommend that you try out one of these projects as they offer immediate positive effects, with some simple steps of configuration.
Here's how i recommend you do it:
Turn on GZIP for that specific folder (Web server level)
Use one of the tools to strip out whitespace and concat the files. This will serve as a backup for search engines/proxy users who don't have gzip enabled. You'd then cache the output of this - so the expensive regex calls aren't hit again.
The above wont be very expensive CPU wise if you configure your server correctly. The PHP overhead won't really be much - As you'll have a cached version of the CSS, ie.
-- css.php --
if (!isset($_GET['f'])) {
exit();
}
if (file_exists('path/to/cached/css/'.md5($_GET['f'])) {
// just include that file...
readfile('/path/to/cached/css/'.md5($_GET['f']));
exit();
}
$files = explode(',', $_GET['f']);
ob_start();
foreach ($files as $file)
{
readfile($file);
}
// set a header (including the etags, future expiration dates..)
Header(....);
echo ob_get_flush(); // remove whitespace etc..
// write a new cached file
file_put_contents('/path/to/cache/'.md5($_GET['f']));
exit();
You can then do href="css.php?f=style.css,something.css,other.css" the script will then make a cache file which is the md5 of those files included.
The above example isn't complete.. it's more pseudo really.