Is this possible with php

Violet

I was wondering if the following would be possible using php, I was also wondering if it would be hard to do...

I want to set up a simple site of the week program on my fan site - The thing is that I want to be able to "Syndicate it" - That is offer people a simple little cut and paste poiece of code to put on their sites, that would let them publish the site of the week on their site as well. Each week I'd just have to pick a new site, grab the button and write a little blurb... or just have it already set up in my MySql database..

I'm quite certain that this would be possible, I just have no idea how to do it.

There may already be scripts publishes for download that would let me do this... if anyone knows of any please let me know

Thanks for your help

brucec

I do not see it happening with direct PHP.

You can have a PHP include and tell the syndicators to add a simple include to a PHP file calling the MySQL on your site. For this to work, the syndicator's web page would also have to be PHP. So, you can try this, but cannot really rely on it. Unless, you tell the syndicators to make the web page using your code a PHP extention and not HTML. Will their web hosting company support PHP. That's an important question.
I can also see an HTML IFRAME to your MySQL.
Use the SAX API for PHP and create some XML. XML is defintiely the way to go for this. To use XML with PHP you need to read up on SAX.

Maybe someone else has a way, but these are definitely solutions.

Pig

They could have an iframe that calls a specific page. Then you just change what that page points at. There are also more options if they have PHP at their disposal, but the iframe would work form pretty much everyone.

Violet

Ive already gopt a mini site that calls php into an i frame - SO I may just try that..

I have no idea what sax is so will go find something to read - Thanks a million for your feedback....

DO you think the idea would be better suited to some other kind of scripting??? I wanted it to work in a similar way to webrings etc...

Pig

If you want to do it 1st class, you should use xml to set up an rss feed. (http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/03/17/index3a.html?tw=authoring), but it's more complicated than a simple iframe. It depends on what your needs are.

bubblenut

That would mean database calls for every view on the other sites as well as on your own. We do a similar sort of thing here with our charts (cds, dvds, games etc) these got out to literally hundereds of affiliates and through the old system (running on iframes) the database was begining to take a bit of hammering.
What we have now is a chart generation system running on a cron job which something like this.
You create templates of how you want the thing to look with tags where you want dynamic data to be inserted, then every time your croned script runns it reads through the templates and re generates the ones it needs to (we chose to have a range of frequencies) and creates javascript (because we needed to pass an affiliate code unique to each affiliate, but probably just html files in your case) which can then be included with a simple <script type="text/javascript" src="http://our.site.com/path/to/file.js"></script>

This isn't exactly what you need but the concept could deffinately be shaped into what you require.

If taking the XML route the same concept applies, build XML files at centain intervals to avoid the database being hit every time.

HTH
Bubble