How to wrap all html responses in a html layout using apache 2.2?

Question

I have multiple web-apps running on a server using different technologies.

• java
• php (wordpress)
• python (trac)

They are all front-ended with Apache 2.2. My question is does anyone know a good way to wrap all these web apps with a common template (header/footer).

I was looking into mod_layout, but the documentation is quite limited and I was unable to get even the simplest example to work.

I also looked at mod_include, but I'm not sure if that is a good idea.

Answer 1

You can force all pages of a certain extension to include a header and footer by setting it out in the httpd.conf of the server, or just in the .htaccess of each particular directory/site with the append and prepend directives like so:

<FilesMatch "\.html$">
php_value auto_prepend_file /path/to/header.html
php_value auto_append_file /path/to/footer.html
</FilesMatch>

The above will match .html pages and will force include /path/to/header.html before the page content as well as /path/to/footer.html after the page.

Just remove the FilesMatch lines if you want to force it on all pages.

Answer 2

Use similar templates for all your applications. Simply slapping extra HTML onto the beginning and end of a page will give you nonconformant output, which is likely to break layout within applications.

WordPress and Trac both have highly capable theming systems. Use them.