relative newbie needs help

[gracesfall]

Hey all --

I am somewhat of a newbie (meaning that although I have been working with off-the-shelf php scripts for some years now, this is my first real foray into writing my own) with a bit of a dilemma:

I need to write a basic CMS to be able to update five sections of a web site.

What are the logical steps to take here? What scripts will I need to write? To my thinking, I need one script to write the form data to the database, one to read it from the database and one to write from the database to the necessary pages.

For each section that needs to be updateable, data will end up being written to more than one section of the web site (which will remain largely static with php includes). For example, the 'News' section:

Upon submitting news information via a form, the CMS will:

a. add a synopsis of the news item to home page - index.html - displaying synopses of the four most recent news items.

b. add a summary of the news item to the 'news.html' page (all news summaries need to be displayed newest to oldest and if more than ten summaries are present a 'next ten' link needs to be generated.

c. a page with the full text of the news article is generated

d. a link to the news article gets added to 'news_sitemap.html' and all such links displayed newest to oldest. If more than 75 such links are present, a 'next page' link needs to be generated.

This sort of thing needs to be done for all 5 sections.

I am not asking for anybody to write this for me. Indeed, I want to write it myself if possible (unless there is an off-the-shelf that will do this). I just need to know what steps I need to take, what scripts need to be written.

Thanks tons!

gracesfall

[please_explain]

Basically content management is like saying.... I want my web pages or parts of web pages to display data dynamically.

This implies that you have to 'store' the data somewhere or in something where your php scripts will read it, and format it on the web site (web pages or parts of web pages) to display it

So now you have a data storage question. How or where do you store it.

Some questions to ask is.... will you need to store these articles or the content for a while. So for example if there's content that is to be displayed in August, does it or can it 'go away' when the user decides to create new data to display? Or even in September and October someone has a need to access data published in August.

If the data is volatile, you might get away with storing it in a simple flat or text file. So then you'll need to analyse the data more closely and design the text files used to store the data and/or look at existing content management scripts that store data in flat files and modify those.

If the data has to be persisted, you'll most like want to use mySQL and store it in a database. So then you'll need to analyse the data more closely and design the tables and/or look at existing content management scripts/tables and modify those.

Hope that moves you in the right direction.

There are various sites (including this one) that have sample scripts for content management.

~It's All About the Data~