I recently read this article on using PHP to manage content. It's perfect for people who want to maintain some static pages outside of MT, but incorporating some MT content.

I was just trying to figure this out--I have a few pages that would be difficult to shoehorn into my blog (without making a lot of other changes), but where I wanted to show my blog categories, etc.

Now, it would be possible to publish the dynamic content to files that would be called as include files by the static pages, but that was kind of contrary to the approach I was using--it would also involve using a lot of includes everywhere, which is a little extra drag on the server. Besides, I already had a nice template, and wrapping that around the static pages would be more work.

So I took the opposite approach: I created a "hollow" MT template (I call it a shell template) that substitutes the following chunk o' code for the unique page content (leaving all the header, footer, and sidebar stuff intact, of course):


Here, "$page" is a variable that you can define in your URL, like this:


You can also use that $page variable elsewhere, echoing it in the page as the title, etc. This assumes you've got a page named "about.html", of course.

I stripped the header and footer sections of the static files away, leaving pretty basic HTML stubs. I still have some work to do harmonizing these pages with my newer stylesheets, but it's pretty straightforward stuff.