More SSI coding done to try to create a ‘boxed’ sub menu (currently only on the gallery section), but the source looked so complex and easily reduced that I tried a PHP version.
Oh yeah, that was a waste of time. Instead of trying to tidy up the obvious repeating blocks of SSI code, I went the whole hog and created start/middle/end menu functions. Yes, it works just fine, except it’s lousy as a website because each page would need to be built differently. All of the look-n-feel was nicely abstracted into variabled for ease of tweaking, but the code had become just that – code. I’m too used to writing software in PHP, and I need to take a step back and just use it to build common macros so that the SSI files don’t become unmanageable.
I suppose I could try to define loads of SSI veriables in one common file that was simply #included into the header/footer code, but that might not be so easy, as variable substitution is an unknown (for me). I would expect it to have simple variables, so links would become a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the link text, which gets rather awkward again.