Server Side Includes (SSI) with ShopSite

Server Side Includes (SSI) with ShopSite

What are Server Side Includes?

Server Side Includes, also know as SSI, is a server side scripting language that allows you to add dynamically generated content on your static HTML web pages.

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What does SSI do?

Generally SSI is used to change elements of a static page into dynamic without using any other dynamic technology, such as CGI or PHP. For instance, if you want to have an up-to-date weather report, you could implement a Server Side Include in order to update the information periodically.

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Why would you use SSI with ShopSite?

ShopSite pages are static by default. But with SSI, you can include a snippet of text or HTML in many places, while only having to update the snippet’s content in one file.

For example, if your level of ShopSite supports inventory tracking, you could use a ShopSite custom template tag that uses SSI to display the product quantity on hand.

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How do you enable SSI for your ShopSite pages?

In order to include SSI to Shopsite, it is necessary to change the file extension on the page you want the SSI to be on. By default, Shopsite sets the file extension to .html on all pages except the ‘Shopping Cart’ (which is set to .shtml). Any page you want to use SSI on, you need to change the file extension from .html to .shtml.

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How do you change file extensions from .html to .shtml?

  1. Log into ShopSite account.
  2. Click on ‘Pages’.
  3. Select a page that needs to be edited and click ‘Edit Page Content’.
  4. At the bottom of the page under ‘Advanced Info’, edit the file name from ‘yourfile.html’ to yourfile.shtml’. Note the letter ‘s’ inserted in front of ‘html’.
  5. Click ‘Save Changes’.

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