Framed! is a PHP script that adds a frame to the top of every page on your site. WAIT! It's cooler than you think. First off this isn't one of those thousands of scripts that adds a frame to the top of your external link - aka, parasite frames. Personally I dislike those and since you don't control the content of the external site, they're unreliable. The purpose of this script is to add what I call a "functionally invisible" frame to the top of all your own pages, and to attempt to maintain that frame at the top of the page, regardless of where the user clicks in your site. There's a ton of information about Framed! and the design that was required in the About section.

So what is a functionally invisible frame?
I use this term because the script takes the original html file and rewrites it. If you look at a site that uses Framed! The correct title and URL are displayed in your browser, and the source includes the full text of the page in the <noframes> tag. When you click on a link in a Framed! site, the page title and URL change, just as if there were no frameset. Viewing the page from a non-frames browser shows the full page as it was originally encoded, with an optional header message in place of the frame. This is what I mean by functionally invisible - the frame appears at the top of the page, visible to the user, but without changing any of the dynamics of the way the site works.

Why do this?
Good question. It started because I wanted to make it very clear that my portfolio cache was just that, a cache and not the live site. Many people don't look at the URL of pages they're visiting and so it's easy to confuse my (most likely outdated) cached sites (eg: http://lorriechurch.cache.ravis.org) with an actual live site.

Sounds Simple...
It does, doesn't it? Read on...

About - All about the thought process / development of Framed! - read at your own peril
Download - Version 1.0

Limitations:

• Must be used with static files. Although you could (in theory) hack it to use the output of PHP scripts, at present it only works with static HTML.
  
• You will need access to your apache.conf or php.ini files to configure PHP to automatically run this script with every html file
  
• This script will slow down loading of your pages, as we're taking what would normally be static HTML files and turning them into dynamic PHP files.

How to use:

1. Open up framed.php in your favorite text editor and set the configuration options. Leave everything else alone.
2. Open up your apache.conf file and find the zone that you want to enable the script for. This can be a virtual domain, or a location, etc.
3. If your files are all .htm or .html (as mine are) you'll need to specify that Apache run them as PHP scripts by adding the following:
   AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
   AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm
   
4. Tell Apache you want to run Framed! at the start of each requested file by adding the following:
   php_value auto_prepend_file /complete/path/to/framed.php
5. Save your apache.conf file and reload / restart Apache.
6. Access your site! You should see the frame you added.

Copyright

This script is copyright (c) 2002 by Travis Richardson (http://www.ravis.org/). You have my permission to use it for personal or commercial purposes free of charge, as well as make whatever modifications you would like, so long as this copyright notice remains intact.

Please do not redistribute the script yourself - it's freely available on my web site for all to use, and you are more than welcome to link to it from your site if you wish. :-)