PDA

View Full Version : HTML Pages


Ken McCarthy
Thu 27th Apr '00, 9:22pm
Hi,

I currently use UBB and have thought for some time about modifying it to use PHP which I also use pretty extensively on my site. Looks like you guys beat me to it, and appear to have dona a super job too.

One suggestion I would like though is to have the option to generate static pages, or at least pages that appear static, so instead of having urls that end like showthread.php?threadid=190 you would have a proper url like 00000190.html ou could easily use set a variable of threadid=190 in the file created and then call showthread.php as an include. The reason I would like to see this is that most search engines have a problem with url's that end with ?xxxx=yyyy.

Could this be done?

Regards

Ken
Martin
Fri 28th Apr '00, 3:57am
Ken, one of the reasons that this program was developed was to get rid of the HTML pages. The thing that slows UBB down (besides bloated code) is that it has to write the posts to 3 different places instead of a central database. This saves time, strain and server space.
Menno
Fri 28th Apr '00, 4:04am
And then there's the updating of the html.......
*shiver*
Ken McCarthy
Fri 28th Apr '00, 4:17am
I agree with you that this is one of the things that slows UBB down, but the fact that pages can be indexed by a search engine is also one of its advantages.

The method I outlined above would not involved writing anywhere near as much HTML as UBB does, pretty much two lines would do it, one to set the threadid variable and the other to include the page that normally shows the thread. I would not think that that would have a big impact on performance.

Regards

Ken
Martin
Fri 28th Apr '00, 4:31am
Are you talking about just building what amounts to a refresh page when a topic is created?

depending on the search engine, if there is no real content to the page, they won't index it to their engine anyway, so these pages just may sit there unindexed anyway.
Ken McCarthy
Fri 28th Apr '00, 7:08am
No, not a redirect probably something like this:

<html>
<body>

<? $threadid=xxx; ?>
<? include threaddisplay.php3; ?>

</body>
<html>

I'm not sure if what I typed above will display, but if it does you should get the general idea.

Regards

Ken
Brian
Fri 28th Apr '00, 8:25am
Provided its installed you could use mod_rewrite to accomplish this easily.

-Brian
Hotrodder
Fri 28th Apr '00, 5:05pm
I found this on one of the PHP sites (I think it was zend.com) I haven't got vbulletin yet to hack it in but maybe someone here can help with that.


One of the problems with dynamic sites is that they aren't picked up by search engines. Many search engines don't read past the question mark ("?") on a URL so if your url is http://www.coolsite.com/article.php3?id=10 they won't access the article with an ID of 10. A way around this is to pull off your query from the URL by parsing on "/" instead. Here is an example:

list($crap,$crap,$id) = split("/",$PHP_SELF);

This will parse the following URL:
http://www.coolsite.com/article.php3/10


Assuming your file is in the root path, this will take the end of your URL and turn it into a variable. Just use $id now as your ID. You can even send multiple queries the same way - just add more vars to the first section.

I hope that helps some. :)
Cold Steel
Fri 28th Apr '00, 5:10pm
It would be great if we could have some sort of HTML to submit to the search engines.
wandrer
Sat 29th Apr '00, 7:22am
How about a separate php script that would take the topics/threads and output them to HTML files for search engine indexing using the suggestion above


<html>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" id=all>

<? $threadid=xxx; ?>
<? include threaddisplay.php3; ?>

</body>
<html>


It could be a global variable as to where to put the static html files ( http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/static/forum1/00001.html )

And then generate an index page for each forum with the topics.

If it is a cron job, you could run it whenever you wanted to update the HTML files. Nightly, Weekly, Monthly, or Hourly... it still wouldn't generate the CPU usage that ubb used, and it would allow you to submit your topic to the search engines...
Joe
Tue 30th May '00, 4:04pm
This is the only thing holding me back from leaving UBB... has anyone figued out how to get the vB threads indexed in the search engines? Im sure this would help out 98% of the forums out there... thanks! :)
Mark Hewitt
Tue 30th May '00, 4:46pm
It would be great to have the search engines index my forums. The replacement for ? with / seems the best bet, also I could set up my server to parse .html for PHP cause some search engines don't like .php (would take some hacking though)

Anyway what you are saying about the UBB isn't strictly true, search engines don't usually index it because they follow links and stop whenever they come across something like .cgi because the UBB is accessed through Ultimate.cgi then they would not index this or any of the pages within it.

"Unless I'm very much mistaken..."
Joe
Wed 31st May '00, 1:09am
Hi mark, your some what right, the standard UBB isnt very easy to get listted in the SE's, becose of what you said, but quite some time ago, a search engine hack came out that listed all the .html files, you would just submit one page to the search engines, and the spiders could crawl all the pages on your forum thru that link, heres my page that i send to search engines: http://www.bikeforums.com/ubb/HTMLsummary/summarypage.html

This software looks great, i think i'll upgrade / trade over in the next week or so.