Website Changes not taking effect

Question

So, I am updating some images on the left side of the website (dog-a-holics.com) I added in the category tree another category - specifically Dog ID Tags. I've edited the index file which is named index.new.html. However, it's not showing up.

I noticed that the site main page keeps going to index.php. If I go to dog-a-holics.com/index.new.html it shows the update (specifically the tag titled "Dog ID Tag").

I am not understanding why this is happening. I am taking over the mess that was left to me from a previous employee and I'm not 100% website savvy.

Is there a reason why a .php file was used?

Answer 1

It's likely loading whichever "index" file is available. If you need it to avoid your php file, rename it to index-old.php or something, and make your html file "index.html"

PHP files are commonly used when you want to do dynamic stuff before sending the page to the requesting-user. For instance, if you need to load in a template header or footer that contains links to other pages, this is generally done with php files.

Search your php file for <?php and ?> or something similar. If you find a set of those, whatever exists in between is what PHP is being used for.

This is a rather simple suggestion. The issue could be more serious though, involving .htaccess files, and request-rules.

Answer 2

When someone goes to http://dog-a-holics.com/ the webserver will choose to serve the file named index.php by default (by convention). Thus, you will have to make your updates in this file for them to take effect as you expect. If this does not work, could you post (at least some of) the content of index.php?

Answer 3

Well I belive I know what is going on if I understand what you are getting at, I assume you are using Apache as your web server? What you need to do is open up the Apache configuration file httpd.conf, and find the line that says DirectoryIndex and you should see after it something like index.php index.html, all you need to do is just change index.html to come first in the line, so it would like like:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

That should solve your problem if I got what you were saying. It happend because Apache goes of what you configuration says and looks for index.php to load as the first page and if it was not found it moves down the list of index names until it finds one.