I am having a little trouble creating a side bar menu and including it on all the pages....
I want to start out with a basic list type menu that takes up about 15% of the page.... so there is no left or top margins. I tried creating a page with a table and using <cfinclude> to include it but it just doesnt work, I can't add anything to the page I included it into. I'm sure I am just missing a few things. Does anyone have any free tutorials I could learn from or just tell me how this is supposed to work?
Thanks
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The page that is calling the include must be a .cfm file. The page that is being included can be a .cfm or a .html file. Try setting up your index.cfm page like this then:
<table>
<tr>
<td><cfinclude template="leftnav.html" /></td>
<td>the content of index.cfm can be entered here. this can be as long or as short as you need</td>
</tr>
</table>
and the contents of your leftnav.html file can be whatever you like. if you want to make your menu in the form of a table that will work just as well.
Or, better yet, ditch the inappropriate use of tables for layout and use some divs with very simple CSS.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtm
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1
<head>
<title>My Page Title</title>
<style type="text/css">
body {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
#left, #right {
float: left;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
#left {
width: 15%;
}
#right {
width: 85%;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="left"><cfinclude template="leftnav.html"></
<div id="right">body of page</div>
</body>
</html>
JeffHowden.... your solution seems like a better practice. I have one other question with it tho... I'm having a frustrating time with styles. I format some text the way I want it and it ends up creating a style, which then screws up other text I had formatted. Maybe its just becuase I'm not used to it and dont understand it.
Honestly, that is outside the scope of the original question. What you're experiencing is the usual difficulties with floats. There are numerous tutorials available for how to create two column layouts like you've requested that address the sort of problem you're struggling with right now. However, the original question involving an include has been answered.
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by: mkishlinePosted on 2006-02-22 at 11:59:40ID: 16022776
Here is a simple example (assume both files are in the same directory)
<!--- leftnav.html (note: no html, head, or body tags, just the code to include)--->
<ul>
<li>Menu item 1</li>
<li>Menu item 2</li>
<li>Menu item 3</li>
</ul>
<!--- index.cfm --->
<body>
<div id="left"><cfinclude template="leftnav.html" /></div>
....
Are you getting an error or does the menu just not display at all? Is your include page a .cfm file? If this doesn't help, please post some of the code you are using and see if we can't help you from there.