Preview defaults to Notepad for .shtml documents

Rick · Post by **Rick** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 2:32 am

The hosting company my primary website had been on for 10 years recently went out of business. The website hadn't been updated in almost 7 years, so I've been franticly re-writing it's 30 or so pages.

I used SSI for menus, copywright notice, etc., on the old website.

An .htaccess file that I think was in the root directory contained two lines that made it un-necessary to use the .shtml extension:

AddHandler server-parsed .html
Options +Includes

On the new server, SSI doesn't work without the .shtml extension. What's worse is WeBuilder defaults to notepad for .shtml documents.

Help

bandrej · Post by **bandrej** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 9:04 am

Options -> Preferences -> Files -> Associations :::> Add SHTML extension

then define WB behavior with this file, under:

Options -> Preferences -> Document Types -> HTML ::::> again, add SHTML

That's it.

Rick · Post by **Rick** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 1:54 am

It did not work, .shtml documents still open in notepad.

Post by **syrupcore** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 2:26 am

even after reloading webuilder?

is .shtml still in the associations list?

Rick · Post by **Rick** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 3:26 am

I shut down WeBuilder and re-started it.

.shtml is in the files > associations list.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see under Document types > html. It's in the list that starts with <none>, but it's not highlighted in any way.

Regardless, .shtml documents still open in notepad.

bandrej · Post by **bandrej** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 9:43 am

Open My Computer, then search for a file with shtml extension, right-click it -> Open with -> Choose Default Program

Then from the list, select Webuilder and click on the 'Alway use the selected program to open this kind of file', then Ok.

This should do the trick.

Rick · Post by **Rick** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 3:24 pm

It did not work.

What did work is to change it to open with Internet Explorer.

Thanks

bandrej · Post by **bandrej** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 4:00 pm

Sounds like your Windows have screwed up some registry settings regarding file associations.

Rick · Post by **Rick** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 1:06 am

IE or Firefox has never had a problem displaying .shtml pages on the internet, just internally stored documents. Regardless of why it happened, that problem is now solved.

Because this is an existing website with search engine traffic I don't want to loose, I'm really concerned about what will happen when a search engine tries to take someone to a .shtml page it expects to have a .html extension. The windows server the website is on now doesn't seem to be able to parse .shtml to .html.

I may have to find a replacement language to link the menus and copyright notice for SSI on about 30 pages on my website.

Post by **syrupcore** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 4:38 am

rick, php includes couldn't be easier and you are not confined to apache. IIS might be able to deal with ssi but I don't think so - not natively anyway.

Code: Select all

<?php include("header.php") ?>

your content

<?php include('menu.php") ?>

more content

<?php include("footer.php") ?>

ps. The reason your browser can't display local .shtml files is because .shtml requires a web server. there are ways around it, but that's the general idea. the same will be true of your local php files - they need to be served up by a webserver for your browser to understand them. Webuilder comes with a server for this reason.