PHP Dynamic Website Help...

madcat

I'm having trouble visualizing the approach I should take to writing this site. It needs to be dynamic. It's a news site so the stories will be changing constantly. I want to build this right from the ground up so that it is modularized and scalable.
I figure I would create two templates. One for the main page and one for the subsequent story pages. Use PHP includes for the common elements and a $content variable for the actual information. Would this be a good move? If so,

How should I start thinking about feeding the information into these templates. The front page will have constant navigational elements that link to the stories of the day or week. For example, if story #1 in the first spot is about speakers, where is the best place to pull this story from? A DB? The story about speakers might only be there for a week, it needs to be replaced by the next story about microphones...is there a way to automate this process efficiently. Or should I just create regular .html files and link to them as I normally would?

I'll have few more questions, but I'll start with these and see if they make sense I appreciate any help on this!

leatherback

Hi Madcat,

What do you have available? Do you have a database available? If so..

Create table with news-elements: id, Title, story, dateinserterd, removedate, importancelevel
Create a template where you build a set of links (Select the most recently inserted tiltles, or the most important titles 'select * from stories order by inserdate desc' , then perhaps check that the removedate has not expired, or have your database remove those automatically)

Then as for the coverstory: You could do a combination of how new it is (insertdate) and the importance level, and decide which story will come up first.

IF it was not almost 1 in the morning here, and IF I have not gone to bed 2 hours ago already (But needed to change somthing for a client) I would give you some source-code. Because it really is not too hard.

Hope this gives you a start

madcat

Ok, I should design the layout first (using CSS in my case), then focus on the DB design right?

For example, I'll have a template that will display a new story and image every week...I should go ahead and design these aspects, then I can focus on the image generation scripts - and the upload scripts to replace the image and story.

leatherback - that's exactly the type of information I need, do you have any sources/tutorials with more info like this? I have all of the sketches of how th site should look and what the links will be.

On the main page, there will be a box that has links to News--

News
Story Link 1
Story Link 2
Story Link 3
Story Link 4

Music
Story Link 1
Story Link 2
Story Link 3
Story Link 4

--> So, these links being dynamic should just be named generically since they will be constantly changed- like storyOneSpot, storyTwoSpot, etc...for Story Link 1, Story Link 2 respectively. See what I'm saying?

Would there be two tables in the DB for the scenario above- News table and Music table?

Thanks again for your help.

eternalprophet

I was working on a site similar to that to play around with. Here are the things I usually do.

Decide which part is going to change regularly, and which are not.

Say you want a banner at the top, navigation or article links on the left, and a footer at the bottom.

Right there you can make 3 different PHP pages. a header, a footer, and a menu page that you include in everything, so when you change the header/footer/menu php file, it will change on every page.

Now if it is dynamic, like say the navigation, you could have the proper code in a php page to say output the 10 newest articles, and have a more articles link after that which will go to a page that might contain an archived listing of articles.

I would recommend using a database for this. If you do not have it, you could always use text files (which is doable, but I find more time consuming and harder to use) or you could use XML (no clue really how to do that, but it CAN be done, I have seen CMS systems that use XML instead of a database)

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck.

Decide what the site is for (information, games, business)
Decide the target audience
Design a rough layout (paper, photoshop, whatever)
Section the design off into what will be on every page, and try to see if you could accomplish this with an include.
Decide whether you want to use a DB, text files, XML, etc
Start coding!
Try to make it function to an extent in different browsers (easier to do in php then it is to do in JavaScript)
Test
Troubleshoot
Throw temper tantrum
go to www.phpbuilder.com/board

OK, the last 4 steps are how I do things.

Best of luck 🙂

madcat

Throw temper tantrum

😃 Super cool +
Absolute.

Thanks for your help! I'll be back as soon as I design the layout. :p

madcat

Quick one: Would it be wise to put my constant navigation bars into the database? If so, would I create a new table just for this nav bar: menuNavTable or something like that...

Or just use a PHP include for that purpose?

webblynx

just create the navigation bar page and name it something like nav.inc. then just paste this in the pages that you want to use the include file:

<?php include("../path_to_include_file/nav.inc"); ?>

it makes updating a breeze. regards.

eternalprophet

You could have it in a database yes, and use the include suggestion. In the include file itself you could just have the proper code to call the items from the database.

As for the database, if you wanted your navigation to be say.

Business Articles
art1
art2
art3
art4
...
art10

Technology Articles
art1
art2
art3
art4
...
art10

Music Articles
art1
art2
art3
art4
...
art10

You could have one database called articles, and have a field in there called maybe "type" and have it as enum tech, music, bus then when you have the code in the include file, only call the most recent 10 entries from the articles database where type is equal to music or whatnot.

Good luck. You could also use an array, but that would mean manually updating stuff, and manually updating stuff sucks 🙂

If you use the database, it would be easier to set up a form to add a new article to the database.

The webmonkey article on PHP/MySQL has some code, and from that if you had a database you could just replace the db name, user name, password, fields with those of your own.

Here's the link in case you or someone else reading this is not sure WTF I am talking about 🙂

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/php/tutorials/tutorial4.html