I've seen a lot of dynamic website through the internet that their pages are in html or htm format . I don't get it why is that ? And how they do that ?
Just look at this website : http://www.realmadrid.com/cs/Satellite/en/Home.htm
What you see in the URL can be set at will by the people running the web site. The technique is called URL rewriting.
How
On Apache, the most popular solution to that is the mod_rewrite module.
Seeing as you've tagged ASP.NET: As far as I know, ASP.NET has only limited rewriting support out of the box. This blog entry promises a complete URL rewriting solution in ASP 2.0
Why
As for the why, there is no compelling technical reason to do this.
It's just that htm and html are the recognized standard extensions for HTML content, and many (including myself) think they simply look nicer than .php, .php5, .asp, .aspx and so on.
Also, as Adam Pope points out in his answer, this makes it less obvious which server side technology/language is used.
The .html/.htm extension has the additional effect that if you save it to disk, it is usually automatically connected with your installed browser.
Maybe (a very big maybe) there are very stupid simple client programs around that recognize that they have to parse HTML by looking at the extension. But that would be a blatant violation of rules and was hopefully last seen in 1994. Anyway, I don't think this is the case any more.
There are a number of potential reasons, these may include:
They could be trying to hide the technology they built the site with
They could be serving a cached version of a page which was written out to HTML.
They could simply perceive it to look friendlier to the user
They might be using a server-side scripting language like PHP or ASP. You can configure what file extensions get parsed by the language by editing the web server configuration files.
For example in PHP the default extension is .php but you could configure the server to use .html, that would mean any files with the .html extension could contain PHP code they would get parsed before the page is sent to the clients web browser.
This is generally not recommend as it adds an overhead and .html pages that don't have any PHP would be parsed by the PHP engine anyway which is slower then serving pages direct to the browser.
The other way would be to use some form of URL rewriting. See URL Rewriting in ASP.NET
Another reason is SEO(Search engine optimization). Many search engines like html pages and many guys（I mean some SEO specialists) think the html can improve the rank of their content in search engine.
One possibility is just historical reasons. Pages that started static, now are generated dynamically, but sites don't want to break old customer's favorites.
They keep some pages as html because their content is not supposed to change frequently or not at all.
But you should also keep in mind the fact that some sites are dynamic but they change the page extention to html but original page remains same eg php or aspx, etc using htaccess or some frameworks like codeigniter etc.
Related
I have deployed an ASP.NET website on IIS 7. I was able to access my site using the URL http://**local host**/sitename.aspx and all the formatting of my pages is looking good.
But when I access the same page by using the URL http://**servername**/sitename.aspx from another system or on the same server where I have been deployed, the page formatting is not working properly.
What would be the best solution for this? Thanks
First a fall to check your Js/Css file path where you have not mention static file path with localhost name.
For more detail go to browser and browse your url and press F+12 so development tool will be open and check there for broken url.
I am not sure why you are worrying about formatting soo much. I mean formatting should not affect you much unless you use <pre> in your html.
There are ways to modify the HTTP Response Using Filters. Can you please makesure none of these filters present in your application for release mode.
Generally i use HTTP compression feature of IIS to compress my content, but in browser it looks correct to me.
In my research, I found 2 ways to do them.
Both required modifications to the Application_BeginRequest procedure in the Global.Asax, where you would run your code to do the actual URL mapping (mine was with a database view that contained all the friendly URLs and their mapped 'real' URLs). Now the trick is to get your requests run through the .NET engine without an aspx extension. The 2 ways I found are:
Run everything through the .NET engine with a wildcard application extension mapping.
Create a custom aspx error page and tell IIS to send 404's to it.
Now here's my question:
Is there any reason one of these are better to do than the other?
When playing around on my dev server, the first thing I noticed about #1 was it botched frontpage extensions, not a huge deal but that's how I'm used to connecting to my sites. Another issue I have with #1 is that even though my hosting company is lenient with me (as I'm their biggest client) and will consider doing things such as this, they are wary of any security risks it might present.
`#2 works great, but I just have this feeling it's not as efficient as #1. Am I just being delusional?
Thanks
I've used #2 in the past too.
It's more efficient because unlike the wildcard mapping, the ASP.NET engine doesn't need to 'process' requests for all the additional resources like image files, static HTML, CSS, Javascript etc.
Alternatively if you don't mind .aspx extension in your URL's you could use: http://myweb/app/idx.aspx/products/1 - that works fine.
Having said that, the real solution is using IIS 7, where the ASP.NET runtime is a fully fledged part of the IIS HTTP module stack.
If you have the latest version of IIS there is rewrite module for it - see here. If not there are free third party binaries you can use with older IIS (i.e. version 6) - I have used one that reads the rewrite rules from an .ini file and supports regular expression but I cant remember its name sorry (its possibly this). I'd recommend this over cheaping it out with the 404 page.
You have to map all requests through the ASP.NET engine. The way IIS processes requests is by the file extension. By default it only processes the .aspx, .ashx, etc extensions that are meant to only be processed by ASP.NET. The reason is it adds overhead to the processing of the request.
I wrote how to do it with IIS 6 a while back, http://professionalaspnet.com/archive/2007/07/27/Configure-IIS-for-Wildcard-Extensions-in-ASP.NET.aspx.
You are right in doing your mapping from the database. RegEx rewriting, like is used out of the box in MVC. This is because it more or less forces you to put the primary key in the URL and does not have a good way to map characters that are not allowed in URLs, like '.
Did you checked the ASP .Net MVC Framework? Using that framework all your URLs are automatically mapped to Controllers which could perform any desired action (including redirecting to other URLs or controllers). You could also set custom routes with custom parameters. If you don't have seen it yet, maybe it will worth the look.
I've got a website that was created about an year ago and its been constantly revised since then. The website is coded in classic ASP, contains about ~50 pages -- some are multi-purpose, and contains old-school style links such as:
/news.asp?PageIndex=4
/news.asp?SearchString=Obama
/news.asp?SearchString=Obama&PageIndex=4
/news.asp?NewsID=1
I have IIRF v2 installed which allows access to URL rewriting functionality so this I do not have to worry about. What I am worried about is how to replace about 300 links to .ASP pages with SEF urls. As far as my understanding is concerned, I have to add a database query (to extract title of the record being linked) for each link.
I need advice on how to begin converting the website into a SEF URL powered website with as little code change as possible. Wrapper classes and tried-and-tested techniques and pointers to best practices will be appreciated.
If you want to do URL Rewriting without changing frameworks or anything, may I suggest that you take a look at IIS7 Url Rewriting Module?
However, if you are rewriting part of your application in .NET ... you might want to consider ASP.NET MVC. It already build simple built-in URL Rewriting module and definitely allows you to keep on using your old "WebForms" (if ASP.NET) or your classic ASP pages.
Don't forget to permanently redirect each and every old link to a new one (use 301 HTTP code).
At news.asp (and whatever other old pages you have) put something (a class? I don't know, I have never used ASP) that parses the old-style URL and redirects (with a HTTP redirect code) to the new URL.
I'm not trying to be funny here but seriously how long would it really take to convert 300 links manually? I really suspect that it would take less time than trying to find some automated approach.
I work for a college and our main website has an ASP.NET based course information search which I created. This has become popular and our company facing website (training for companies) has asked for the same system on their website. I'm not involved in the day to day of either website but know theirs was made using Wordpress. Is it going to be possible for me to embed some ASP.NET code within some of the pages? Any articles on doing this?
EDIT:
The ASP.NET code that would appear in the actual Markup is minimal it's mainly a few asp:Literals I did this on purpose to hide most of it from the website developer to save myself hassle when something gets deleted by accident.
EDIT2 There was a response to do it as a webservice would this be possible. i.e. as search box on the main page displaying the results underneath.
Since asking this question a long time ago and creating a less than ideal iframe solution I have now found a great wordpress plugin called iframe-less
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iframe-less-plugin/
Basically you give it an URL and it builds the content of that page directly into your wordpress page. So far it seems to work really well.
I have similar needs that the originator of this thread has. I maintain a CRM and corporate site that runs on ASP.NET/SQL along with a separate Wordpress php company blog. After we've been using Wordpress for a year, people here would love to be able to edit static content on our corporate site like we do in Wordpress, so I am looking at possible ASP.NET/Wordpress hybrid set ups.
I am hearing good things about "Phalanger": http://www.php-compiler.net
It is a PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework, and you can run PHP code in .NET
It was also great to find out in this thread that you can have PHP and ASP.NET in the same IIS web, its another reasonable sounding solution. If I had any nay reputation (I am new here) I'd give RickNZ a vote.
What you could do is create a web service on your ASP.NET application and then write a Wordpress plugin, that would read that service and display it in wordpress page.
This wasn't ideal but the solution I produced involved using IFrames which are still in the HTML 5 spec (infact they have some new attributes) so I think I am ok. Basically I make a page in wordpress with an IFrame and some javascript on its onload to make the iframe resize automatically based on the content size using the code below (iframe called frame with width 100 percent).
function autoIframe(){
try
{
var page_height = document.getElementById('frame').contentWindow.document.body.scrollHeight;
document.getElementById('frame').height = page_height+60;
}
catch (err)
{
window.status = err.message;
}
}
This code will resize on loading of the first content, if the content changes it will need to be called in someway. My solution was to call the method from the innerpage using parent.autoIFrame() each time a search was done.
p.s. The javascript will only work if the iframe and outer page are from the same domain (No cross site scripting).
Wordpress uses PHP and MySql. I have successfully installed and run it under Windows 2008 with IIS 7. The new CGI stuff in IIS 7 results in pretty good performance, too.
You can of course run a separate but related ASP.NET-based site on the same server.
You can also run a mixed ASP.NET + PHP site. IIS directs incoming requests to a particular HttpHandler based on the extension of the URL, so there's no reason why you can't mix *.php & *.aspx.
In fact, you can also do things like write a .NET-based HttpModule that integrates with a PHP/IIS site, to do things like logging, centralized cookie management, HTTP header "adjusting", etc.
If you want to put ASP.NET controls in a *.php file, that's a different thing entirely. To do that, you would need to write an HttpHandler that understood how to parse such a file. Either that, or just use iframes....
Short answer: no, not easily. Wordpress is PHP - you can't just put some .net code on a PHP page.
Long answer: yes, if... if you are really keen to do this, and it's worth the time and effort, you can work around it by using some of the strategies suggested already, e.g.: host the ASP.NET bit on a windows server (or use mono) and show it inside an iframe on the wordpress page.
Just bare in mind that this is not a common setup, and may be more difficult than simply creating or using some kind of Wordpress plugin.
I am exploring http://sourceforge.net/projects/wordpressnet/ if it helps anyone ...
Also,
http://wpdotnet.com/ (related article : http://www.php-compiler.net/blog/2011/wordpress-on-net-4-0)
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/installing-to-a-net-server
I know it is an old post and I too do not prefer necroposting but
these resources may improve the existing content.
WordPress is a LAMP(Linux Apache MySQL PHP) application, and normally running in Linux servers. I don't think you can integrate ASP.Net to wordpress. But off course you can provide link to ASP.Net application from WordPress.
No, this won't work. You cannot use ASP.NET on pages that are served by WordPress. You can use ASP.NET in the same web site as Wordpress, for example by having certain directories or certain pages serve ASP.NET content, while the rest of the site still serves WordPress content.
However, if the ASP.NET code you wish to use is very simple, why not do it in PHP instead? WordPress uses PHP, which is very similar to ASP.NET.
I can be able to use both Asp.Net and Wordpress on my Host (Dinamo.net.tr)
without using any plugin or iframe.
They can really work together,
you just upload your Asp.Net C# files,
and install Wordpress at the same time.
Sites like cnn.com or foxnews.com.
Where do they store all the articles? In html files? In database?
More logically to store everything in DB but how to generate a static link to something that is inside DB?
It's not that they have a a dynamic page load like: LoadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=123, every article has it's own address.
Please explain how this is done.
They use a special content management library called VoodooLib.dll.
Seriously, when you write something to a database, you normally generate some kind of unique identifier - 123, for example. It gets permanently associated with that record (article content). After that it is used to generate the same id as part of an Url at any time later.
As for the static link, it is a simple matter of Url Rewriting.
You generate static links to display on a page because they work much better for SEO. When a request for that static Url hits the server, it gets substituted for something "server friendly" and then gets to be processed.
They probably use some form of Content Management System (CMS). There are many different ones out there - most store the actual content in a database or as XML (some store XML in a database). They will the either publish that content as static HTML pages or, more commonly now, as dynamic pages that are cached. Many use what are known as "friendly URLs" that are virtual addresses that are mapped to the actual physical file path using URL-rewriting techniques.
Note you can't tell whether a page is dynamic or static simply from the extension. It is quite possible to have dynamic pages that end in the .html extension.
Just because the URL looks "static" doesn't mean it is; they could be using something like mod_rewrite or an IIS ISAPI to make the URLs more search engine friendly.
For the high-volume news sites that you mention, however, they may very well generate the pages statically in order to prevent overloading the database with repeated requests for the same article.
Look at the URl of this page, it doesn't have xxx.aspx?some-query-string
You are refering to using friendly URLs.
To do something like that, one common way is to use URL Rewrite and/or some custom HTTPModule
Here's a good reference: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx
Just because a page has a normal URL does not mean that it isn't serving dynamic content. With the Apache mod_rewrite module, it is possible to manipulate URLs. So, for example, a page like http://www.domain.tld/permalink/12345/message-title-slug can be converted internally to http://www.domain.tld/permalink/index.php?id=12345&slug=message-title-slug.
I do not know exactly what cnn.com and foxnews.com use, but I would bet that they use a Content Management System (CMS) which serves all pages dynamically, with the content stored either in a database or on the filesystem, and with authoring/publishing all being performed through the particular CMS.
Just checking cnn.com, the article links have in them
Year
Location (US or WORLD/specificlocationid)
Month
Day
Article name.
All of this information together can be used to uniquely identify any article (even less of it is probably actually needed). The dynamic content loading page address could easily be hidden by some method of URL rewriting, and then the information in the requested URL is used to determine which article in the DB is to be served up.
I don't know why all the other answerers seem to assume that some form of URL rewriting is necessary to create friendly URLs. It's not true at all.
It's perfectly possible to write web serving code that splits a URL into parameters - eg year, month, title - and pass that directly to the code that gets the content from the database, without any need to rewrite the URL. Most modern web frameworks such as Django and Rails include this functionality out of the box.
This is done through mod-rewrite techniques.
Here's an article about the mod rewriting engine: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html
And here's their "guide": http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
I hope that helps. It should make for a good starting point. Goodluck.