adrianj Posted December 7, 2009 Share Posted December 7, 2009 Greetings to all. Yes, the topic is framesets...and I need help shedding them! Long story short, I've constructed a website for my little brother who I love dearly. He is in the entertainment industry (singer, soon to sign a major contract!). I needed to build a pretty feature-basic site that needs one very important asset that is unique to any of my past projects: the ability to play his music continuously from page to page without stopping. This was a major problem for me conceptually, as the only way I could really think of doing that based on my experience would have been to create a frameset where the music plays in an invisible frame and is controlled by the main frame. The user does not see the frame in any way, and right now it works, but they obviously can't bookmark. I do not like frames, but outside of re-coding the website in entirely flash + actionscript (which I could do, but didn't want to for this project for usability), I don't really know what my alternatives would be that would also allow the site to be easily crawled for search engine placement and bookmarking purposes. I had started to look at an AJAX +PHP/ASP solution to dynamically load each "page" in a div container as needed and the music in a div container that never changes, but I'm not sure if that would be indexed by search engines, how to make that crawl-friendly, or how to make the url change for bookmarking purposes. As such, I'm not sure if that's the direction I need to go in, nor do I know how I'd do that anyway at this point. So there's my dilemma. I've never had much need for AJAX or extremely advanced knowledge of PHP or ASP in my web work (which is very minimal); only the basics. But solving this issue without framesets, I believe, represents a limitation that I can only escape through learning something I don't already know. And so I turn to this forum of experts for your good advice. If you all have any idea how I can accomplish the goal of playing music on each page without using framesets, please let me know. Where I need to start, how I can conceptualize and rethink this project, and a solution that I can implement as fast as can reasonably be expected. The website: www.jshoc.com Thanks in advance, all! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chezshire Posted December 7, 2009 Share Posted December 7, 2009 You're going to have to establish a session using php, but the problem will be that you'll have pauses when folks change pages and such I fear. Have you considered exploring flash? -Chez Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FaT3oYCG Posted December 7, 2009 Share Posted December 7, 2009 the only alternative reading through your whole post would be to dynamically update the page's content once a link is clicked, this mans lots of extra coding and you will need to understand the methods and uses of AJAX. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adrianj Posted December 7, 2009 Author Share Posted December 7, 2009 Thanks for the replies, fellas. Chezshire - Yes, pauses would be a bad thing. I have a bit of flash running on the site right now, but the only method of using flash to resolve this issue would be to rebuild the entire site in flash, such that there are no real "Pages" in the traditional sense. It would work, but it would limit the site to flash-enabled browsers and still keep bookmarking broken. FaT3oYCG - I was afraid of that. Based on my readings of AJAX today, I can kinda see how that could work, but I feel like it would take a pretty hefty effort for me. Almost starting all over, really. But let's presume, for a moment, that I'd like to do that. Based on what I've been reading, is it safe to assume that I would need to create a series of scripts that would dynamically populate my divs? Perhaps storing the contents for each div on the 9 pages in some sort of array that is pulled down one line at a time and placed into the corresponding div? Also, I've been experimenting with some basic AJAX and have found that pages have some trouble executing javascript when calling a page using this method. or was I just doing it wrong? I'd like to know what that my option looks like so that I can at least explore the pro's and con's and make the most reasonable decision. since the site is working, I'm somewhat disinclined to pursue it further...but I also wouldn't mind the education that the experience would probably afford me either. thanks again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FaT3oYCG Posted December 7, 2009 Share Posted December 7, 2009 Well, I would say that it would be possible and would work perfectly well if carrried out correctly, reading a book such as AJAX and PHP: Building responsive web applications would be a start. As I stated before and you just implied, yes it would be a tremendous ammount of work, and in your current position I don't know if I would bother. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haku Posted December 8, 2009 Share Posted December 8, 2009 There really isn't another solution for the situation unfortunately. AJAX and frames (or iframes) are the only way to keep music playing non-stop. The advantage of AJAX is that it's possible to build deeplinking into your scripts using a hash in the URL and some fancy javascript. The difficulty is that any new javascript that is loaded will have to be evaluated, and that brings even more complexity into the matter. For someone with no AJAX experience I'd say this is probably out of your league. It's some advanced javascripting. Even for someone with AJAX experience, if they haven't done a project like this they would find it difficult. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustLikeIcarus Posted December 8, 2009 Share Posted December 8, 2009 Another more simpler solution to this would be to open the music player in a new window with its chrome elements stripped away so it looks as close to a music player as possible. While not the optimal way to go it would fix your issue. With that said, do you think that this is absolutely necessary? Most sites that I visit for artists have a dedicated page for their media. Not all visitors will want to play the music so another thing you may want to consider is not having music which starts automatically as it tends to annoy visitors. You may in the end simply prefer having a designating page for discovering the artists music. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adrianj Posted December 8, 2009 Author Share Posted December 8, 2009 understood. I've gone ahead and picked up that AJAX and PHP book recommended by FaT3oYCG and will see what I can learn. I'll be sure to update this thread with thanks and all that good stuff when and if I can enhance it with my newfound AJAX sill. regards, all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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