Hi! Please bear with me, i'm still growing as a website developer (using a fresh install of latest SMF)
I've started a website. I tried for a clean look, it uses includes to keep the same menubar across the top of each page and it looks very uniform. I am 100% against websites that throw you to a forum that looks different then all the uniform pages you were just browsing, where you lose the easy to navigate menubar and have trouble getting back. i want it to look just like any other page, just with a forum in the middle.
I did some research and saw SMF was a good free forum. I installed it to a subdomain (forum.mysite.org) so it didn't overwrite my index.php on my main site (mysite.org/index.php)
I want to embed SMF on mysite.org/forum so i dont loose my uniform look. I first looked to frames, but from some experimenting and digging up old posts it seems SMF just can't handle being put it a frame, it will never work that way. So that seems out.
I tried using the SSI commands on mysite.org/forum. I have
<?php
require("path/to/the/SSI.php");
ssi_menubar();
?>
and it KINDA works - it displays the hyperlinks for the menubar options, but it's not in any good format, it's just 5 lines of bulleted hyperlinks.
trying to add in other functions from the SSI examples in the same folder gets me
Fatal error: Call to undefined function template_ssi_above() in /homepages/12/somenumbers/htdocs/forum.php on line 42]
What am I missing? Is it the subdomain messing things up? is embedding SMF just a monumental task newbies shouldn't try?
I've tried messing with just changing the template to have my menubar at the top as a less than ideal but doable workaround, but i'm not finding any luck there either though i might be able to power through it by going back to HTML instead of an include and hardcoding all links instead of trying to be relative.
Maybe this can help. :PPPPP
How do I integrate SMF into my PHP coded website? (http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/How_do_I_integrate_SMF_into_my_PHP_coded_website)
I appreciate that, but thats what i tried when i said "I've tried messing with just changing the template to have my menubar at the top as a less than ideal but doable workaround".
It doesn't work for me. I think all my php references stuff under the main domain, not the subdomain, and never the twain shall meet. I can hard code around this by actually using HTTP://mysite.org/whatever for each image and link, it just defeats a lot of the purpose of a common header file.