Dynamic documents

Jarl

I've just finished reading the first 20 chapters of the PHP manual on php.net so I'll say that I'm ready to get started. (fianally 🙂)

But I was thinking:
Which ways is there to make dynamic documents?
I was thinking using get and post but out of curiosity: Is there other ways too?

cnperry

There are numerous ways to create dynamic documents. It really depends on what you want to display and what your data sources are. A lot of people will focus on database integration for their sites. Look through this web site and you'll find some good tutorials. I guess we can't really help you point you in the right direction if we don't know what you want to do.

Herk

I agree that your question doesn't help us to help you very much, but in answer to your question, "Yes, there are other ways."

There is $GET and $POST. There are other globals like those you can use as well. Like: $REQUEST and $SESSION. Or you can store the data in Cookies on the end user's disk.

Also, databases like previously mentioned, and flat file storage is also an option, albeit not a very commonly used one.

Just be careful which one you use for what. I'm no expert, but they are all very different and should be used for different tasks. The biggest problem with using them improperly is security from what I understand. Good luck.

Herk

Jarl

Well what about the most commen thing.

A news document which when called maybe by itself find the ten latest news and show them.

Thus when new news come it will always be uptated.

Herk

Well do you want news updated by an outside source with an xml or rss feed, or do you want news that you add entries and the page is updated?

If you are referring to the second one, where you add news entries and then the page updates here is an idea. Basically, there are just a few functions you'll need to have:

One to add an entry
One to delete an entry
One to edit an entry(optional)
One to display x number of entries.

Then, you'd need to have a sql database of some sort to store the entries in. On the page where you were displaying the news you could just call the display function like:

display_news(4);

where 4 is the number of most recent entries to show on the page.

If you are interested in checking out how I did this for learning sake check out http://www.theherk.com/source.php?file=resources/integral.php. Down at the bottom there is a section called "News Class" and one called "News Admin" then you can see what I do with those in http://www.theherk.com/source.php?file=resources/control.php in the section "News CP" which is quite a ways down. The way I would display news on any page would be like:

$newsreel->news_display(4);

where 4 is the number of most recent entries to show. If you go to www.theherk.com you can see the news display on the main page.

Hope that helps a little.

Herk