Dynamic header & footer from other application

Question

Hi all,

we are trying to integrate q2a with a custom php application. 

We would ideally not want to rebuild the header and footer inside the q2a app and then have to maintain it in both apps.

Also the header and footer is not static but many things change depending on whether the users is logged in, what actions he has taken in the custom php app etc.

So the header and footer can be quite personalized and the logic is already built in our custom php app. Again.... we dont want to duplicate all this inside q2a.

What would in your opinion be the best way to tackle this? We were thinking of building some sort of web servce that returns the header and footer and then make an advanced theme that consumes this service to inject the header and footer for a given signed in user. 

Any other more elegant way you can propose? 

Answer 1

That's one way to do it.

Or it might be easier to use an IFRAME to embed the header/footer served from the other site, and include that IFRAME code via your Q2A advanced theme. Just make sure all the links in the iframe have TARGET="_top" !

Comments

thanks for the rapid response! Ideally we would avoid the use of iframes so that all the navigation and footer links are within the actual page sharing all the SEO value via internal linking etc.