SSI Information

[Rieekan]

Hey everyone, I'm looking for as much information as I can get on Server Side Includes. I've been playing around with the information that I can find, but it's not very intuitive or complete as I've picked it up from various websites.

Does anyone know of a good site to get information regarding SSI or even books to recommend on the subject? Any help would be appreciated!

- Ted

[petesmc]

I highly dought there are books on the subject but i have personally written a short but sweet SSI tutorial.

Located here:

http://www.codingclick.com/article.php?aid=2

Good luck, if you have any questions just ask me...

Peter

[JordanTLClive]

Thats a great tutorial but one extra note is that if you use ssi on almost all your files in your site (such as a menu include or header include) you can add the following line to .htaccess if you dont want to go through and change all your extensions and links to reflect the new filenames...
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html

What it does is tell the server to parse all html documents. This is very useful if you already have a site which you wish to integrate SSI into the majority of the pages.

And again an additional note: as indicated in petesmc's article on SSI, some hosts disable exec ssi's or all ssi's due to security issues. Neither of these present any extra security issue. SSI simply includes something that is already there into another document, so SSI calls cannot cause any danger to a system. In other words, if there were a "security issue" within a SSI call, it would also be present elsewhere, in another html or cgi document, which could be called directly to do the same exact thing. Some hosts will disable them because they are process intensive, this may/may not be true. It is not any more intensive then calling those scripts seperatly, the only time its really an ADDED problem is if you have a HUGE site, and you make an SSI call to a CGI that is very server intensive process in a lot of your pages. Then you could get in trouble. Overall, SSI is misunderstood by many. If you ever do have a problem using it, be sure to try and inform your host:)

[petesmc]

Some hosts do not like having the server parsing .html documents for SSI directives. As this slows the server considerably...

I will enter that now and say that his produces a large server load if you get many visitors...

Thanx for reading over that...

My site isn't even launched...

[JordanTLClive]

Right, only add the .html to server parsed html if you are incorporating SSI into a large site and dont want to rename all your files, but use SSI in them all.

[Rieekan]

Thanks a lot guys! I think I can find what I'm looking for in here, and if not, I can always wrap it up in perl or just write it in PHP instead. I'm really just interested in seeing what SSI can and can't do.

Thanks again!