At first what I want to do seems easy. Use some includes to put in some additional text at the bottom. Sure, easy, no problem:

just use: virtual('/cgi-bin/silly_file_here.cgi');

and I'm all set. Nope. I can't use PHP unless I turn on the advfooters option so I do so and now I have to reconstruct the footers template.

That's not quite so simple. If I put the whole footer into the include file then variables like $copyrighttext and such aren't replaced by their values.

Next I think I'll get smart and use some variables like "$footer_a" (and b and c) to make it. $footer_a is the simple text before the cgi include, c is what comes after it, and b is the include itself (the virtual I showed up above).

then I say

$footer = sprintf("%s %s %s",$footer_a, $footer_b, $footer_c);

What happens then? The bottom of the page looks fine, except where the output of the cgi should appear I have only a "1". At least my program returns true. The actual output of the cgi (an ad) appears at the top of the page since it is apparently sent to the browser immediately and not inserted into the footer as simple text.

Does anyone have any thoughts on making this work?

I'm on Apache, so the virtual command works fine, I just can't quite get it to behave for me the way I want.

Erik,

I had to use iframes to pull content in without turning on the advfooter / header (and that is also too limited as it only parses the header and footer.

<iframe src="http://whatver.com/content" height=whatever width=whatever noscroll margins etc etc>
no iframe content
</iframe>

that will do it for you.

Take a look at my forums on http://www.gandmasti.com/forum/ to get an idea of how I've used iframes.

Shri

[Edited by shri on 07-17-2000 at 01:03 AM]