PHP Virgin-Deleting/sorting from a txt

Anon

Hi everyone... (With help)I've recently built an admin tool for my review site which allows my reviewers to go in and via an HTML form enter their name, the date, a title, a summary and a body for a news story. When they hit submit, the title and summary display on the homepage, the title alone displays on the News page and the full data displays on a third page which is the actual news story page. All of this is currently being written to a text file.

Unfortunately, due to a tight time constraint I was told to make it live on the site before the section was completed for Editing, Sorting and Deleting the stories as they're added. I'm not sure how to do this🙁 Particularly Sorting and Deleting. Currently each new story added displays below the one added before it, and I need it to sort by the date, as well as have the ability to Delete old stories from the text file without affecting stories I want to keep.

Sorry this was long winded... if I need to enter more info here please let me know.

Thanks in advance!🙂Caspergrl

brandonschnell

use a database. you'll go insane otherwise if you try to keep track of the news stories in a flat file.

jamesh

I would get ahold of MySQL (free from the website) and install that. Get a quick and simple tutorial on MySQL/PHP (a search will turn up quite a few) and make a simple db to replace the flat file. It is MUCH easier to sort the data in a db and make it jump and sing.....a flat file won't play as nicely.

Anon

Hi, thanks for the replies everyone🙂 I'm afraid that I do have access to a MySQL db and that was what I originally had planned to do. But despite discussions with my ISP's support folks and friends I wasn't able to connect to it (well I could connect but not read from or write to it)... I was getting an Access Denied error. I'd received proper usernames and passwords and none worked, I'd also had a friend give me some sort of username/password string to try inputting in the db but that didn't work either (I'm also very unfamiliar with MySQL but familiar with how db's work... I was using a gui interface type program to add tables and the db itself).
Any suggestions with the text temporarily untill we can get the db situation straight? Thanks again for your help!!