Many customizations for Movable Type call for using PHP scripts that require that your pages have a .php extension rather than a .html or .htm extension.

PHP is a server-side scripting language which involves a) the server looking at your pages for a PHP script, b) running the script, and c) outputting the results to the page. This is called "parsing". In order to successfully use PHP in your pages, you need to ensure that your account on your webserver is set up to parse your pages for PHP scripts. This feature is pretty standard these days, but check with your webhost before attempting a conversion to PHP.

"Converting to PHP" simply means changing the pages of your site to have a .php extenstion rather than an .html extension. Your pages will still display HTML as usual, but with the added benefits of of PHP scripting. For example, you will be able to use dynamic content, such as random photos or quotes, which alter with each page load (unlike MT plugins, which alter on each site rebuild.) Being able to include certain information into each page is easier and quicker with PHP includes. If you're using a mySQL database to power your site, the options are even more greatly expanded.

These instructions will detail how to change the extension on all of the files created by Movable Type (except the .cgi ones).

Dealing with Duplicates

As mentioned in step 5, rebuilding your site after changing the file extensions will result in duplicate copies of your pages on the server, one with the .html extension, and the newer one with the .php extension. Because of this you are now using twice as much server storage space as you really need. If you have space to spare, you might be happy enough to leave it as it is. If not, you might want to delete the duplicate .html files.*

Before you make the decision on what is right for you, there are a couple of things to bear in mind. First, the files with the .html extensions will no longer be updated. Second, people may have linked to your entries with those .html extensions. If you delete them, and someone follows a link, they will get a 404 Page Not Found error.

So, what to do? You might consider creating a custom error page, telling your readers that you've made a change to your file extensions, suggesting how they can find the correct page. Or you could set up a redirect to send them there automatically.

For help with creating a custom 404 page, see this tutorial for some ideas. Also, it's a good idea to add a search box for you MT installation to the 404 page, as well.

* One thing you should note is that MT does not rebuild the files for pop-up image files after they are first created, so do not delete these. From this point on, any new files of this kind will have the .php extension, and any existing links your have to these image files will continue to be correct.

Loading index.php by default

What if you've deleted your index.html, but when you view your site, you're just getting a directory listing, and not your new index.php file?

1. Look in your root web directory for a file called .htaccess. Sometimes this file will be hidden, but you should be able to set your FTP progam to show hidden files. The .htacess files contains a set of instructions that tell the webserver how to handle some things related to your site. (See What is .htaccess?)
2. Download that file to your desktop, and open it up in a text editor like NotePad, or my favourite EditPad Lite (or BBEdit for Mac). If the file contains other information, be careful not to edit any of it!
3. Look to see if the file contains a line beginning with DirectoryIndex. If it does, that's the line you'll need to edit now.
4. If there is no such file on your server, simply create a text file and continue with the rest of the instructions.
5. If you didn't have an .htaccess file, or your existing one didn't contain that line, add a new line to the file cotaining this code:

   DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm

   This line gives an instruction to the webserver to serve the index files in the order of preference listed. So, if there is an index.php it will be loaded. If there is not, then the next option in the list index.html will be shown, and so on.



6. Save the file you've been working on. Your text editor might decide to add a .txt extension to the file. That's fine. Just rename the file after saving to be .htaccess.


7. Now, upload your file into the root directory of your server, overwriting the existing file if necessary.


8. Now when you got to your Site URL, your index.php should appear.

It's all too complicated?

There is an easier, alternative way. What follows is a method for having our pages parsed for PHP scripting which involves no changes to your MT set up, and avoids the need for duplicate pages or redirects. I could have posted this first, but learning how to alter your MT config settigs is a good skill to learn.

1. Follow the first 2 steps under Loading index.php by default, and get ready to edit the .htaccess file.
2. Add the following line to that file:

   AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm .php

   What this line does is to tell server to look through all of the .html, .htm and .php files in your hosting account (not just the MT generated files as with the previous method) for PHP scripting.

As mentioned, an advantage of this method is that your permalinks will not change. An obvious disadvantage, or inefficiency, is that you might only have PHP scripts in a small number of those pages.

As a sidenote, if you have a tool like cPanel for your hosting account, you may also be able go use it to make this change. Login to your cPanel, and select "MIME Types".