Fixed Pages in a Content Managed Website
Included Page
This type of fixed page is so called because it has a page record in PanPage's content database and is therefore included in the site navigation menu.
You create an included page just as you'd create a fully content managed page (see User Guide) but then you edit the page's PHP file and replace the call to $page->Render() with HTML content as you would in a regular fixed HTML page.
You can still use all the column and item styles you use in PanPage managed pages or you can ignore them and do something completely different.Because there is a page record in the content database you can still use page functions such as RenderHeadTags() and RenderFooter(), or you can remove those calls too and replace them with your own fixed HTML. You should keep the calls to $g_Site->RenderNavMain() and $g_Site->RenderNavDrop() so that the navigation menu keeps up with the rest of the site.
QuickEdit will still work, tho you'll find that only things like the page header and footer will highlight when you mouse over them, and only then if you used the managed versions from the PanPage page record. The remainder of the page can't be edited in PanPage.
In PanPage Themes
In PanPage themes the call to $page->Render() is usually buried in the pagecommon.php file and the page file contains just a call to WriteBody() or similar. That function in pagecommon is usually implemented as...
WriteBodyTop();
$page->Render();
WriteBodyBottom();
In your PHP page file you should replace the call to WriteBody() with WriteBodyTop() and WriteBodyBottom() as above and place your HTML content between the two. WriteBodyTop() goes as far as opening the content section of the web page, eg. <div id='page'>, and WriteBodyBottom() starts by closing the content section, eg. </div>, so your HTML content should start by opening the first column in your content and finish by closing the last column.
Excluded Page
An excluded page has no page record in the content database and so PanPage knows nothing about it. Excluded pages do not appear in the navigation menu or sitemap.
Create an excluded page by making a copy of one of the page template files or of an existing page file. Edit the PanPage initialisation code at the top of the file so that cmsInit() is called with a blank page name...
$page = &cmsInit("", isset($_GET['QE']), isset($_GET['PrVw']));
...there isn't even a space between the opening and closing quote marks in the page name argument - it's just an empty string.
The effect of this is that all the PanPage 'site' functions, like $g_Site->RenderNavMain(), will still work but there is no page record at all and all of the $page->... functions, if you call them, will just return blank content.
In PanPage Themes
This works in the same way as for included fixed pages but because there is no page record some of the functions in pagecommon.php will return empty results - the title and description tags and the page footer will be empty for example. If you need your excluded pages to be search engine friendly the only way around this is to replicate the WriteHeadxxx() and WriteBodyxxx() functions in your page file, substituting fixed HTML code for the appropriate lines of PHP. This usually isn't as complicated as it sounds since much of the code in these functions consists of PHP echo commands outputting recognisable HTML, or they drop back into HTML anyway.
Why Use an Excluded Page?
Excluded pages are useful for jobs like processing and acknowledging a form submission or reacting to an event. Such pages would not normally be accessed other than when their event occurs.