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PPC> Web
building> Software
Automatic Links tables in
FrontPage
Maintaining links to everything on your Web
site can be a pain – but not if you use FrontPage’s Categories
to help
If your website has lots of individual pages (HTML
files) and you need to maintain a number of topics, Microsoft’s
FrontPage Web-building application can help enormously.
The process of generating automatic links to pages within a
category is quite straightforward, and doesn’t rely on the server
you use having FrontPage Extensions installed, so you can use this
technique on just about any server you choose. Here’s how to go
about it.
Firstly, you absolutely must have your site mapped
out and organised into topics and sub-topics – but as we’ve said
before here, that’s a sign of good Website design anyway.
Let’s say that your site is about music, and you
cover a small number of topics – Band Biogs, CD Reviews, a Gig
Guide and Gig Reviews – that’s four topics in all.
You’d create a category for each topic in
FrontPage. It’s very simple, and easy enough to find – I’ve
used FrontPage 2000 (FP2k) for the example:
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Step 1 – Find the category list
With any page open click on <File> <Properties>
to bring up the Page
Properties dialogue box. Click on the rightmost tab,
marked “Workgroup” and then on the “Categories”
button. That will bring up the Master
Category List as you can see here.
This is where you do the business, as it were.
There’s a list of default categories built in, which most
people can simple discard – to do that highlight each one
you don’t want and click the “Delete” button.
Add new categories as you need them
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Step 2 – Add new categories
In our example site, I’ve added four new
categories, to coincide with our four topics. Obviously, you
can add more, should the need arise. Just type in the new
category name and click on “Add”
Don’t go mad here – add new categories
only as you need them.
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Now that you’ve created your new categories, you
will need to apply them to pages in your site. The secret, again, is
that Page Properties dialogue box – that’s where the categories
are applied, and you can actually do this retrospectively, and in
bulk.
If you haven’t already noticed it, FP2k has a
Folders view (click on the yellow folder icon) which will show you
your site pretty much as you’d see it in “My Computer” or in
Windows Explorer. In this view you can select multiple files to work
on
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What you do is, again, very simple. In this
case, we’ll open the “cds” folder, which holds our CD
reviews, by double clicking on it. That will open the folder
and bring up a list of all the files in there
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With the folder open, you can see that
there’s not just HTM files in there, but also some mp3
filetypes. Obviously we don’t need those to have a category,
as you’d want to link to them in a more refined way, with
explanations and so forth.
However, the procedure is the same, since FP2k
takes care of this – its categories apply only to HTML
files, so you can simply highlight all the files in the folder
(or pick the ones you want using a <ctrl><click>, just as you’d select individual files in Explorer
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Now that you’ve got them selected, you can
click on <file><properties> and bring up the Page Properties dialogue box
again. Now, in the “Workgroup” tab, you can select eh
categories you want to apply to the pages you’ve selected.
This time, though, whatever categories you
click in the boxes will apply to all the pages you’ve got
selected. Since we’re in the “cds”
folder, we’d click on the “CD”
category. Now every HTML page in that folder has a category
type of “CD”.
With that done, click on “Apply”
and “OK” and
we’re ready for the next stage
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By the time you’ve applied categories to every
content page in your site, you’ll be able to link to them
automatically, and, more importantly, you’ll be able to add items
to the links and menus without having to hand-code the links.
Here’s what you do.
If you now create a menu page, pointing to each
topic in your site, you would want to list all the subjects (pages)
in that topic.
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So, decide where you want the list to be, and
put your cursor there. Now select <insert><component><categories> as you see to the right
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This will bring up a new dialogue box, which
asks you how you want your automatic links formatted. We want
to include the “CD” category, so click in that box (as
shown).
Next, you’ve got to decide how you want them
sorted. You’ve got the choice between date order and
alphabetical order by page title (which is why it’s
important to use good, memorable page titles, which you’re
prompted for when you save the page). For the CD reviews,
Document Title is probably best, but for Gig Reviews, date
order may be more appropriate.
Next, you may want to include the date the
page was last modified. And finally, any comments you may have
added to the page.
We use a similar setup for the category
indexes on Practical PC and we don’t use either of the last
two, but, instead, write descriptive page titles – you can
see the results in any of our main indexes.
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Once you completed your selections, click on OK, and
FP2k will create a little bot to sort out your code for you. Rather
than show you a screen dump of what the results will look like when
someone access your page, I’d simply point you at any of our
indexes, all of which use this technique to maintain links to
articles. The beauty of the system is that, every time you create a
new page, you can assign a category to it, and it is automatically
added to the list of links.
The page that the list is on is automatically added
to the list of pages to be updated, so, instead of having to
manually find your way to your index pages, add the link, check that
it works and FTP it up to your site, it all happens automatically.
It’s a
great time saver, and it also means that you know
your links are accurate every time you upload your site. Give it a
try!
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