Dynamic Website Questions

craigm

I'd like to create a dynamic website with remotely contributed articles using a MySQL database. I'm comfortable with PHP and MySQL but not sure how to go about this.

I'm aware I can have a query pull up a text file or a path to an image file as part of a dynamic page, but the whole work flow is new to me. I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel so if someone knows a good way to do this please let me know.

How should the page reference the article? What's a way to do this that's actually easier than just pasting the text in the page?

Will the articles in the database be available to search engines? If not, how do I make sure search engines can find my content?

Thanks in advance.

planetsim

About search engines..

Yes they can get the data from the database but they way they do it if i recall correctly is actually parse the page.. Just like a normal html file..

I can see your just getting your feet off the ground with all this PHP MySQL stuff by the sounds of things so i will suggest a simple news edit/add/delete and select tutorial

http://www.spoono.com/tutorials/php/

craigm

planetsim,

Thanks for the link, I didn't find anything there to answer my other questions however.

I guess I'm just looking for an explanation about some the practices of operating such a website. I don't really need code.

I don't have any problems adding, selecting and displaying information from a database.

I'm looking for more a "big picture" sort of explanation about the conventions and management practices that make the implementation practical and useful.

I feel like I need a primer on dynamic web site management but I have yet to find one.

planetsim

Im not entirely sure on what sort of explanation you want but ill give it a whirl... Oh and i was getting the idea you wanted code.. sorry for that..

anyway getting to my explanation

Using a database instead of Copying Code and updating the site entirely is a useful thing. And has really changed the way ive done things with websites.

Now using a databse to run your site is quite fast depending on your host, what type of database your using and how much data is actually in the database..

Now making this practical to use..
I guess mainly not having to update code and uploading a new file everytime to your host when you add something. When doing this if you have a section requires extra bits on other pages it can be a real hassle. Using a database will eliminate all that. Now you dont really require a database you can use flatfiles. Yet it is very slow but with small amount of traffic and not much data to handle it can be quite an effective method..

I cant see what could be easier than using a database.. As you can manipulate the data as much as you please to make the best result once and not have to go over it all the time... I mean here adding things like Italics, bold etc i think you get what im saying..

Doing this all the time can start to become very time consuming. Although to do it in a database you may need to add that html code or BBcode depending on how well you have set up your code.

TO finish off storage.. Keeping a whole lot of data in one spot rather than in all your html files etc, is so much better and i see it as being a much more practical solution..

Its probably not great depth.. but i hope it helps in some way.