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Sites pages question

Forums: Suggestions and Feedback
Created on: 03/30/10 08:59 PM Views: 2255 Replies: 13
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 8:59 PM

Okay, I hope I explain this correctly.

I have 5 sites some of the sites have the same information on a couple of site pages. I would like to be able to make a site page point to the page on the main site instead having to update the information 5 times.

I just would like this to be seamless.

Example

Site LCHS www.lchstnalumni.com - Alumni Donations Page

When you click that page it automatically sends you to the Alumni donations page on the Main site - www.lakecountyalumni.com

When an alumni makes a donation, I have to update it on all 5 sites and the object would be to have the ability for the site page to point to one central page from the link on the site.

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Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 10:37 PM - Response #1

Yep I see what you're wanting to do -- you don't want to have to keep updating that table of info time after time.

The bad news is those sites are self contained, i.e. they do not "talk" to each other in any way. In programming lingo what you're trying to create is known as an "include" file, which essentially means you make content just 1 time, and then you can "include" it in multiple areas of a site.

But, like I said, you have a case where you want to include information in one database on a site with a completely separate database. Which isn't possible.

There is one possible solution you might consider. While you can't share data in a database across sites currently, one thing you can share is images. You can pull in an image anywhere on the web just by including the link to it. Thus if you took your donor information and put it into a program like Adobe Photoshop, you could just save it out as a GIF graphic and upload it to your File Vault. Include that same image on every one of your web sites. Then in the future when you want to update the info, you would just update it graphically, and upload it to your File Vault again. The minute you do, all sites are now updated without having to go into all of them separately. Although a tad clunky, this solution would work.

The only other thing I can think of would be to actually custom program the feature just for your sites, where one page would automatically feed all of your sites. We'd have to bill separately for writing such a custom feature though, as this would be something that happens on your sites only, outside of the regular system.


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Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 10:53 PM - Response #2

That sounds great.

How much would that be to add?

I have a Main Alumni Associaiton Site plus 4 School sites which make up the alumni associaiton.

Our School district consolidated in 1964 thus the extra school sites.

I also support 3 independent class sites which doesn't necessarily have to be included in the feed

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Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 11:00 PM - Response #3

Well, it would not be cheap... The programming rate is $150 an hour and creating such a feature would take about 3 hours. Happy to custom create that but I'd definitely considering using a graphic, which you can do yourself for free.


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Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 11:46 PM - Response #4

5 sites! I just had to say...God Bless You Alumni Guy!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bonita

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Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 10:38 AM - Response #5

Would this work? If you had that page on just one site, you could link to it from the other sites but have it open in a new window so you don't lose the site you're currently in?

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Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 1:44 PM - Response #6

I am crazy I have 5 alumni sites plus two class sites

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Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 9:52 PM - Response #7

Create a page in Word or some other word processing program, save it and print it as a PDF doc using CutePDF, upload to file vault and link to it from the other sites. Get free CutePDF at cutePDF.com. It installs as a printer driver so you just select it as the printer, save the file and upload it to the file vault.

To update open the doc you've created, make your changes and print it to CutePDF and upload new file.

Delete the old PDF first so you won't have to change the links. If you don't the upload program in CC will name it with a variation of the original name.

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Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 9:51 AM - Response #8

Randy Turnage wrote:

Okay, I hope I explain this correctly.

I have 5 sites some of the sites have the same information on a couple of site pages. I would like to be able to make a site page point to the page on the main site instead having to update the information 5 times.

I just would like this to be seamless.

Example

Site LCHS www.lchstnalumni.com - Alumni Donations Page

When you click that page it automatically sends you to the Alumni donations page on the Main site - www.lakecountyalumni.com

When an alumni makes a donation, I have to update it on all 5 sites and the object would be to have the ability for the site page to point to one central page from the link on the site.

Randy,

Here is something you might want to try. It is similar to an INCLUDE like Brad was talking about.

If you visit this page and copy the code, you can create an announcement that has a tabbed document inside of it and that tabbed document would be the included document that you save to your File Vault on one of your pages (it could be a PDF, etc.)

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/tabdocviewer.htm

I have tried it on my website using their source code and it worked fine.


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Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 9:26 PM - Response #9

Hey Brad,
I finally got around to trying this and cannot get it to work. Maybe I am not doing something correctly. When I pasted the URL all I got was a red x.

Can you give me the steps on how to do this?

Thanks

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Friday, April 2, 2010 at 12:06 AM - Response #10

please tell me exactly where I can see the red x


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Friday, April 2, 2010 at 8:39 AM - Response #11

I tried getting this to work and I am not sure if it is what you want. You can use the page backup feature on the
http://www.lchstnalumni.com/class_admin_pages_form.cfm?custom=7
to see what I did. But it didn't work in Internet Explorer - instead of showing the page, the browser went to that page. It worked fine in FireFox. In Internet Explorer, I couldn't even EDIT the page because it would go to the http://www.lakecountyalumni.com/class_custom8.cfm page

I have currently removed it and restored it to what it was before I messed with it.

This might have worked better if you had a PDF file that was uploaded to the File Vault, then instead of referencing the class_custom8.cfm page, it showed the PDF document. But I think that the idea is to get them to the class_custom8.cfm page so they can make a donation and the PDF document would just be text so they couldn't make any donations through it.


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Edited 04/02/10 9:14 AM
Friday, April 2, 2010 at 9:21 AM - Response #12

http://www.lakecountyalumni.com/class_custom8.cfm

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Friday, April 2, 2010 at 10:18 AM - Response #13

Use the REDIRECT command.

Edit page with Alumni Donations link on four of your sites.
Place this source code on the page:

The number preceding the url (in this case zero) tells the browser the number of seconds to wait before redirecting to the new url.

You can set this to to a higher number and add some optional text:
"You are being redirected to blah, blah, blah"

Click this:

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Edited 04/02/10 11:23 AM
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