While working on an older site that used Server Side Includes I found it hard because my WAMP server environment was tweaked enough to use the older include method. I could switch the whole site over to PHP and use that type of include; however, that would be way to much work.

I came across an article which suggested I add the following line to my Apache “httpd.conf” file found in the “C:\WAMP\bin\apache\apacheX.X.X\conf” directory.

Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +Includes

This  was located around line 273. This didn’t work. I found another article which gave the following suggestion.

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes

When I dropped the “+” before the items my WAMP wouldn’t turn green anymore. I restarted the services but the WAMP icon in the tray never turned green. I added the “+” back and my WAMP turned green quickly; however, the includes still didn’t work.

The article also said to remove the comments from the following lines which I found around line 478.

AddType text/html .shtml
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml

This still didn’t work, but the article goes on to say use “.html” instead or “.shtml”. Changing the “.shtml” to “.html” did the trick. I can now use the old HTML “#include file=”somefile.html” “.

Let us know if this helped you…