Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: HirtopMRS Jun 21 2022, 04:17 PM

Hello,

I’m new to this HTML thing, mostly tried to learn from youtube.
Recently i decided to create a website for my business which is a restaurant but i only have 2 menus a day called : Classic and Special” for which i created the index page, the clasic page and the special page.
I only have these 2 menus eAch day of the week. Every week the menu changes.
Now, my question is if i can do somehow to create an app or to edit the text in HTML pages, but without having to get in the actual HTML editor, because every week the menu is changing and i need to write it on the website and i dont want to touch the HTML pages. I just want a text editor, externally of my website pages which will modify that text in my actual page.
I want this solution because i have an employer who does this job and it must be kept simple. He sees the text in maybe a word document or in an app, he edits the text, and the text it will appear in the HTML page and implicitly on the website

Thank you in advance !

Posted by: pandy Jun 21 2022, 06:33 PM

A text editor is always the best. For the HTML too. At least we tend to think so around here.

There are ways to include one file in another. You could have you menu in its own file and include it in the main page. The server does the including.

Two things to think about though.

It's very simple to do this, you just put a special tag in the HTML where you want the included file to be. But you need to engage another language on the server that sort of scans the page and replaces that special tag with the content of the included file. PHP or SSI would be the most common options.

And, if the menu itself is formatted the included file will also need to contain HTML - that your employee doesn't want to deal with. If you can stand a menu in plain text you could write the hole thing in a text file with blank lines instead of P tags and so on and include it within PRE tags (preformated text, https://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/block/pre.html ).

Another option, a last resort if you don't want to deal with anything server side, is to use an IFRAME.
https://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/special/iframe.html
The same thing about formatted text applies as if you use includes.

Posted by: Christian J Jun 22 2022, 07:54 AM

Hello!

Do you mean, each week there's a new Classic and a new Special menu? So both of these pages need to be changed every week, and maybe also some text on the index page (like "This week's Classic: X, this week's Special: Y")?


Is the changing text spread out over the pages, or is it just one coherent section of the page that changes?


A text editor is the easiest.* However if the changing text is spread out over the page, things need to become a bit more complicated and perhaps more vulnerable to user error.

* Not sure if Microsoft Word is safe to use though, at least it use to garble up HTML code. Notepad would be a safer choice, but there are many other free text editors available (assuming the user wants to install one of them).

Posted by: pandy Jun 22 2022, 12:11 PM

As I understood it Word is used only for the original text sent to the employee and he is then supposed to somehow get it into the HTML. But come to think of it, if he copy-pastes Word formatting could screw things up. So better not use Word then.