The 'Include' File Command

The ***include file*** command is a useful command that more people need to know about.

Basically put, it copies the contents of a file to where you place the ***include file*** tag.

A good example to discuss this would be the menu you see on the right-hand side of this tutorial page ------------------>>

As you can see, the menu is repeated for every page in this tutorials section. If I hard-coded it in directly, I'd have a hell of a time changing it on every page it occurs on. So instead I used the ***include file*** command to get AutoKeen to re-copy the code from one source every time it updates.

For this example, I created a file called ensignlist.html. In this file I keep the code for the list of links that forms the menu. In the workspace version of this page, I then inserted ***include ensign/ensignlist.html*** .

Now for the breakdown of the tag. ***include is the command, while ensign/ensignlist.html is the file name, and the second row of stars *** closes the command. The ensign/ before ensignlist.html tells AutoKeen that ensignlist.html in the folder called 'ensign'. This is because I have ensignlist.html in the folder ensign. For normal pages jsut put filename.txt or whatever.

Every time I update (granted, it's not that often, but let's not get into that) I only need to make changes to ensignlist.html. The next time I update, AutoKeen will automatically update the side menu for me based on the contents of ensignlist.html.

Simple eh? One thing to keep in mind that AutoKeen copies this from /public_html and not /workspace, and when you might have to update the page twice for the first include to show up: Once for the source code to appear in public_html, another time for AutoKeen to copy the contents of that file to where the tag is.

And that's it!