dynamicaly generating static pages

[Anon]

My site is www.scalenet.com/index.php3

I have dynamicaly generated content on the page that is generated every time the page loads. I only need this content to be generated once a week. How can I dynamicaly create files that I can then include() from my main page. I.e. I have a script that generates a list of catagories, this changes infrequently so I'd like to have this script create a file called catagory_links.inc.
This file would end up looking like:
<a href="1.php3"> catagory 1 </A>
etc. etc.
then I could include() that file.
thankx

[Anon]

If you've got access to the PHP CGI, you can use that to produce the static pages. Otherwise, wget will do the job.

The way I did it was to create two directories, /source and /compiled. Source contains the scripts that generate the dynamic content. A Linux script changes directory to /compiled, deletes everything in that directory, then runs wget on the /source directory, Wget processes the PHP scripts in /source and saves the results to /compiled. I call the Linux script from a cron job which runs it every night (it could just as easily be set up to run once a week).

There an article on this site explaining how to use the PHP CGI. Read the man pages for wget and cron. You might also want to take a look at a previous post on this subject at http://www.phpbuilder.com/forum/read.php3?num=1&id=105265&thread=105264.

HTH,
Beth

[Anon]

There are lots of ways to handle this. One way is to implement pull-based caching, either directly in your application or with a "wrapper" that takes advantage of PHP's ability to open URLs (thus accomplishing pretty much what wget does in Beth's suggestion).

Basically then the logic looks like this:

If the page exists and it is less than a week old, serve it with passthru(); else { query database, build page, save the results, serve it}.

Some commercial content-management systems, notably Vignette, take this approach and implement it at a module level. This takes load off the database and allows some routine processing to be done one time, while preserving the dynamic nature of the top-level presentation (supporting personalization, et cetera).