The Demo Site

I have created a Demo site using Dreamweaver.  I used a HTML5 template, because I figure I probably should learn some HTML5 while I am doing this.

The first thing I had to do was setup a ftp user on my website and give the user access to the “demo” folder.  To make things simple, I also created a subdomain for the demo folder (http://demo.deanlogic.com).  Unfortunately, the Dreamweaver template is a little finicky and the path url to the image wasn’t correct on my first couple of attempts to drag and drop the image into the page.  Also, the css added to the page when using a pre-defined template causes hickups when you delete code.

For now, I have just removed the default text on how to use the template and added my site’s logo. Baby steps.  Because I created the index page as a php type, I can add a little php code to the page as part of the example.  A quick demo would be to add the copyright notice in the footer.

As most coding sites do, php offers examples at the bottom of the functions page.  This is very helpful if you don’t fully understand the function.

To create a copyright notice that continues to update without intervention, you only need to get the current year and display it after the copyright text and symbol.

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date('Y'); ?>

So that it is a little more “authentic”, the copyright year should probably be in the format of a range (i.e. 2007-2010).  This way, you can have a static start year and a continuing end range.  Since the start for the Demo site is this year, then I will be a little more tricky and only do the range once the year flips over to 2012.

Copyright © 2011
<?php
if(date('Y') != 2011) {
print(' - ' . date('Y'));
}
?>

Actually, not very hard or tricky to do.  Just check to see if the current year isn’t equal to the set year (i.e. 2011) and if it isn’t, then print out the dash and the current year.  The start year is static.

I’ll probably add some more simple php script to the main demo page later.  I know I will probably have to use some other php script for other examples in the future.