Flatfile News Database

[Anon]

Hi there,

I'd like to be able to update the "news" section on a site I'm building by having it read froma .txt file like this:

Post Title, Poster's Name, Post Body
Post Title, Poster's Name, Post Body

And so on. I want to be able to put all the data from each line into a small table, one for each line. Fairly standard appearance for a news page. However, I'm having something of a brain freeze. Where would I begin?

Thanks,
Peter

[Anon]

I am by no means an expert and have not even tried the approach I am about to suggest. Try doing what you want using an XML file that describes your news stories. I assume you don't have access to a database since you are talking about a flat file.

I think there is work being done on the "NewsML" format. This is an XML data type definition specifically for news interchange. Look here for a press release:

http://www.iptc.org/newsmlprel.htm

You can then use the php XML parser functions to read each news story into an object that can print itself out etc. The advantage to this approach is that if the NewsML takes off, you will probably be able to find tools for making stories as well as giving your stories to exchange stories with other sites that support the format.

At the same time, you won't need to write a parser for your stories as the XML parser does a lot of that work already.

Good luck.