questions about php

[Anon]

I'm still not clear on some things with php, so if anyone can help, that would be great...

Here's the deal. I'm doing a redesign for a site which is broadcasts a weekly audio program online (via realplayer). There are a number of things such as the playlist, for example, that is updated every week, yet we keep the playlists from previous weeks accessible so that a user can go back and see the archive.

Until now, we've been creating a new html file every week and batch processing the archived files with the updated data. For a while this has been fine, but now there are getting to be quite a few html files which will make re-programming a pain, both now and especially in the future.

I was told that using php/mysql would be the ideal route to go for the sections of the site that could be generated dynamically from a database. Our hosting provider supports php4 and mysql.

The information that I haven't found, though, is what the PHP code is that I insert into the html in the areas where it will insert the dynamic information. As well, I'm not clear on what the interface for updating the mysql database is. Is it done via the web, or is it uploaded via ftp?

Also, can images be stored in a mysql database, or how would images be brought in to match up with data (text) from mysql?

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

note: here is a link to the playlist as it is now: http://www.qrok.ca/nest/playlist.html

[rrijnders]

http://www.php.net/manual/en/

[edwardsbc]

Shawn,

A couple of pointers:

PHP is an parsed script language. This means you would be renaming your playlist.html file to playlist.php and entering php code into the file. The new extension tells Apache (or whatever your web server is) to pass the file to the PHP parser for processing. The results of the parsing are returned to the users browser. (It is possible to parse all *.html files, but this is inefficient.)

Second, the code you "insert" is highly dependent on your needs. Please look at some sample applications to get an idea of what is possible (almost anything is possible with PHP :-)

While you can store images or other large binary data in MySQL it is not usually recommended. Most file systems can retreive the image faster as a standard file. Store the image in a directory and then store the path/link information to it in the database.

If you don't have any experience with set-based databases (like all SQL based databases) you should probably learn more about how they work before you attempt to implement a dynamic site.

[thefury]

Yes php would be awsome for this.

I suggest you get a book on php, something like by peachpit or the bible. There good starters and decently good for experienced guys. (I got both)

Yes images can be stored in Mysql, I’ve done this myself. It's very easy if you got the hang of php and sql. It's all about creating a certain type of column that understands the data inside isnt normal. Like Blob.

When you get the image into mysql its all about selecting it and using Header functions to tell the client is a image not text.