Yep I'm new but I'm trying to learn >:)

Anon

Hey,

I've been thinking about learning and trying to use MySQL with PHP to make my site (imparticular article section) dynamic, and easier to update.

Before heading off blindly trying to learn the necessary syntax to do such a thing I wanted to ask a few things....

1) If in a table I had for example :

ID Author DateOfPublishing Keywords4article Article Title Article

Could I basically put the entire article (in xhtml) in the Article field ?

2) Is it possible to create a form for other writers on the site to cut'n'paste their article in (xhtml format) hit submit - the database accepts it - the page is then produced ?

3) Is it then possible for the article listing page to then update itself with the new article by producing a straight list of Article Titles ?

Sorry if this all sounds confusing cos heh it does to me 🙂

Thanks for any help

rulian

1 Yes - with a blob, not sure how big you can go though, better off linking it into a text file or any other file you can include ('file');

2 yes- copy paste or upload (text files again)

3 yes - simple database query will order your results by any means, alphabetical, by date, by author, what ever

khaine

Answer to all three is yes. You can do all that. But it will take a bit of work. You might want to start with the basics and build up to the larger things. By the way any particular need for the xhtml??

Mark.

Anon

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your replies !! I wanted to be sure that what I wanted was within the scope of MySQL and PHP.

I don't suppose anyone knows of any good tutorials dealing with any aspect of what I wrote in my initial post ? I've been all through the tutorials on this site. Just looking for some others 🙂

Re: xhtml - I hate bad coding and always try to learn the most recent webstandards. All my webpages are written to W3C standard and validate perfectly.

Thanks again, and Merry Christmas 😉

Anon

I'm in the same position as you -- I wanted a PHP-based "content management system" that produces perfect XHTML, and since I wanted to understand it, know how it works and learn PHP in the process, I wanted to write it myself.

I quickly realized that that was totally impossible with my super-newbie skills, so I decided to cheat. 🙂

I browsed through hotscripts.com's PHP CMS section and downloaded a few scripts that promised the sort of functionality I wanted -- article categories, user comments, etc. -- and poked around at the code and stared at it until it made sense. After I found one with most of the stuff I wanted, I made sure the license agreement didn't prohibit modifying the code, and proceeded to EDIT THE FILES INTO SUBMISSION until the script did what I wanted.

I'm still working on the editing into submission part. 🙂 Eventually, I'll end up with someone else's script, modified to fit all of my needs, and I'll sort of feel like I had something to do with its creation and be happy I've learned something about PHP in the process. To give thanks for that, I'll link liberally to the original script's web site, noting that my site's powered by a customized version, and thank the original author for his or her work. Some authors like getting email to see where their script's being used; if your pet script's author says something along those lines, it'd probably be nice of you to email him or her also, with lots of thanks and maybe some notes on what you'd done.