... and Settling In

Once you have uploaded the HTML Master Pages program files to your web-site, you'll need to tell the Apache web server how to use them. This is easy as long as your web hosting provider allows you some control over the Apache web server's behavior (usually by permitting you to create a file named .htaccess in the root directory of your web-site). The exact name of your Apache configuration file can be changed by your web hosting provider, so you may need to discover the permissible name if this doesn't work as expected.

Add the following lines to your Apache configuration file:

/.htaccess

# Enable HTML Master Pages
Action html-master-pages /demuxer.php
AddHandler html-master-pages .htm
AddHandler html-master-pages .html
AddHandler html-master-pages .phtml
DirectoryIndex index.php index.phtml index.html index.htm

Analysis

The directives in this configuration file provide the following:

```
# Enable HTML Master Pages
```
An innocuous comment that is used to inform others (and remind yourself later in case you forget) just what this section of settings will do.
```
Action html-master-pages /demuxer.php
```
Defines an Action named html-master-pages which instructs Apache to use the /demuxer.php program to read and process files that are mapped to it by the next three AddHandler lines. If you opted to upload the HTML Master Pages files to a directory other than the root of your web-site, you'll need to set the path here accordingly. Note that this path is relative to the root directory of your web-site, not the web server.
```
AddHandler html-master-pages .htm
```
Instructs Apache to use the html-master-pages Action to process any file that is named with a .htm extension (a short-hand extension for HTML files).
```
AddHandler html-master-pages .html
```
Instructs Apache to use the html-master-pages Action to process any file that is named with a .html extension (a normal extension for HTML files).
```
AddHandler html-master-pages .phtml
```
Instructs Apache to use the html-master-pages Action to process any file that is named with a .phtml extension (an extension for HTML files that may contain PHP code). You may omit this line if you know without any shadow of doubt that you'll never want to use PHP to generate dynamic HTML content.
```
DirectoryIndex index.php index.phtml index.html index.htm
```
Enables the named files to be loaded automatically by Apache whenever an otherwise empty directory name is requested by visitors. Because we are asking HTML Master Pages to handle all *.htm, *.html, and *.phtml files and we know PHP is enabled, we are also allowing Apache to use all index.[php|phtml|html|htm] variants as the default file that will be processed whenever a visitor requests a path by its directory name only. This is the difference between allowing visitors to access http://your-site/ or forcing them to fully type http://your-site/index.html to gain the same benefit. This is a convenience for you and your visitors which may not be necessary in every situation. For example, some sites (particularly of the Microsoft IIS family) may add default.php default.phtml default.html default.htm to this list.

Notice we specifically do not map .php files to HTML Master Pages. An in-depth look at why we don't is covered in the Using With PHP section but for now, it is best to trust that doing so is a bad idea. If you have a bunch of .php files that you are actually using to generate HTML, it may be better for you to rename those files to have .phtml extensions than to just map .php to HTML Master Pages.

Of course, you may elect to create any mapping that better fits your situation. If you would rather not override the default Apache handlers for your HTML files, you may prefer to dedicate a new file extension like .resource to trigger HTML Master Pages. Whatever file extension you choose needs only be used with your resource documents but you must realize that using non-standard file extensions may make it more difficult for visitors to hand-type what would otherwise be obvious URLs into your web-site. Your visitors should not need to access your Master Pages directly, so your Master Page files need not use the same file extension(s) as your resource documents.