CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlcss
Rockmaninoff
Rockmaninoff

Reputation: 3573

Easy way to "organize"/"render"/"generate" HTML?

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?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 157

Answers (4)

mingos
mingos

Reputation: 24542

I'd recommend Drupal. The tree structure of a menu is an inbuilt function and you basically can forget about it at all. And inserting whatever you want in specified areas (footer, header, whatever's defined in a template). It relies on PHP and MySQL - that stuff can be used on almost any server. And it has a moderate learning curve, so you should be able to start doing magic in little time.

Upvotes: 1

mVChr
mVChr

Reputation: 50205

...........Wordpress?

Upvotes: 1

Oli
Oli

Reputation: 239988

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.

Upvotes: 3

Quentin
Quentin

Reputation: 944442

You use a template language.

Most often this will be processed on the server, but there are offline solutions which you run though a utility to generate complete HTML documents for uploading.

I'm rather fond of Template-Toolkit which I usually use server side with Catalyst but it also very usable before you involve a web server using the ttree utility.

Upvotes: 1

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