Dynamic SSI and Code Parsing

Server Side Includes (SSIs) are special tags in the webpage HTML that instruct the web server to include the contents of another file in the page before displaying it to website visitors. This makes updating a common piece of code, such as a page header, easier since you only have to update one file instead of many.

SSIs only work in static pages (plain HTML pages), not dynamic pages (such as search results or article previews generated by a web application). For dynamic pages we need to use a different method to resolve SSIs and you have two different options:

1. Server Resolved - This method supports all SSI tags and allows you to have PHP, ASP or other server side code in your dynamic pages. Dynamic pages will be temporarily saved then requested from the server so they can be resolved as if it they were static pages. This is the recommended method.

   You get to select the file extension temporary files are saved with as that can affect how the server interprets the file. The default for html files with SSIs is 'shtml' or 'php' for files with php code.

   If your publish directory is password protected and requires visitors to login then the program will need to login as well to view temporarily published files when resolving SSIs and server side code.

2. Emulated SSI - This method supports virtual include SSIs only. Other SSI tags and server side code are not supported in dynamic pages. The program loads referenced files from virtual include SSIs and includes them in the output. You would use this if 'Server Resolved' is not supported by your web server. Basically, it is emulating the SSI process.

   To emulate SSIs the program needs to be able to locate the SSI files. In most cases this can be done by adding the webpath from the url (eg: /documents/myfile.html) to the end of the website root path from the filesystem (eg: /websites/yoursite.com/hmtl/). Some servers can have virtual directories the don't correspond to directories in the filesystem. You can define those here to indicate where files in virtual directories can be found.