Re: FN-FORUM: Disguising the path of a page

date posted 3rd March 2008 19:03

On Monday 03 March 2008 17:35:17 Anne Pennington wrote:
> Dear all
>
> I have a site for a local business group:
>
> http://www.actonbusinessforum.net/
>
> linked to a forum that my partner has created
>
> http://forums.redmason.net/ActonBusinessForum/ (link on left hand
> column)
>
> The site and the forum are hosted separately and they have requested
> that it appears they are in the same place, ie the path does not
> contain redmason etc.
>
> I have experimented by putting the forum in a single frameset frame
>
> http://www.actonbusinessforum.net/forum
>
> which looks OK, if archaic and does the trick.

It does look fine as you have done it, text browsers make the fact that it is
a frame more obvious, primarily because the the two PHPBB cookie's being set
are obviously from forums.redmason.net, and there is (depending on cookie
policy) a pause before loading the page, but that is hardly an issue.

Of course the final version would benefit from using valid markup (closing the
head tag and using body tags etc.. etc..) but I assume that its just a test
page at the moment.

>
> Question is:
>
> 1.Is there any problem doing it this way, browsers, scrolling etc
> etc, anything at all?
> 2. Is there a way of doing this in CSS instead of frames?
>

Now, I'm not sure about the rest of the people on this list, but I tend to try
and avoid frames as much as humanly possible. They are useful for this kind
of thing, but do come with a host of additional problems in terms of how
usable, accessible and indexable the result is, for example I like to
bookmark my posts, not possible in your configuration.

The frame also seems to break what navigation and design continuity the site
has, you may want to address that, although that would be very difficult if
you keep the framed layout.

You can emulate frame like behaviour with CSS, so if you want content with
scroll bars you an achieve that, but I don't think you can display dynamic
remote content with CSS without using something server side to grab the
content you want to display.

What would be rather better than the framed solution would be to simply to add
another CNAME Record into the DNS for a subdomain of actonbusinessforum.net/
and point it at forums.redmason.net and use that, this will give the
appearance of the forum being in the same place. It does however look like
the DNS for actionbusinessforum.net is being handled by 1and1 and I'm not
sure how easy that will be to do (it will be package dependent, if its shared
hosting you will probably need to use a 3rd party to handle the DNS).

There are a few redirect methods that would also allow you to disguise the
path, but these will give different results on different browsers the first
time the page is visited (in terms of what the user will see), the way you
can do it will also depend on the amount of access you have to the
actonbusinessforum.net hosting, again with 1and1 shared hosting this is easy
to achieve as you can use per directory .htaccess files (out of interest you
can also use per directory php.ini files for other PHP specific chicanery)

> Greatly appreciate any advice on this.
>

Since you are using PHPBB for the forum (and correct me if I'm wrong but it
looks like a bog-standard install) surely it would be more desirable and,
unless there are technical barriers not disclosed here*, trivial to simply
move the forums to the same host as the rest of the site (or the other way
obviously).

The Server on which http://www.actonbusinessforum.net is hosted is an Apache
1.3.34 and seems to be hosted with 1and1. 1and1's Apache based hosting
generally offers PHP albeit PHP as a CGI process as opposed to PHP as a
module (Apache upgrades due in the next month for 1and1 customers as well I
believe) so I suppose PHPBB may require tweaking (I haven't looked for a
while).




> I am on the digest.
>

I started this at about 17:45 and its taken me rather longer than anticipated
to complete, so I hope it reaches you today...

> Thanks to anyone who takes the time to have a look. I am on the digest.
>
> Annie
>
> PS. I also posted this to another list yesterday but no response.
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Anne Pennington
> [EMAIL REMOVED]
> http://www.digitalplot.co.uk

Cheers.

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Andy Halsall
Director
ICTSC LTD, "The ICT and Security Company".
Direct: +44 (0)114 335 0392
Mobile: +44 (0)750 511 1705
Non-Geo: +44 (0)845 224 2591
Sales: +44 (0)845 224 2305
Web: www.ictsc.com

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