Problems :(

smacky_wolf

Well, I made the mistake of agreeing to build a website. So far, I have had no problems what so ever, except maybe a little trouble with compatability. (ie: damn photo album)

Now, I've come up against a wall. I need to have a database that can not only be viewed dynamically, but have new information added and old removed.. without using anything like phpMyAdmin, because the person who will be in charge of this site is not totally computer literate.

The database needs to accessed by a page, a name selected and then a new page opened with the information about that entry displayed. So, I turned to PHP.

Bad, BAD move. NEVER try to learn a language you have almost never heard of before to do something specific.

I have managed to get so far as to being able to access my database, and at least that works properly, but now I'm stuck. Very stuck.

I have recieved uncountable amounts of help from a friend in IRC, and these have let me get further, but unfortunatly not far enoguh. Can anyone help? I know I need to use the $POST and $GET and everything but I have no clue HOW.

So far my site is viewable here, but without any PHP. www.uhlenhof.com

Suggestions? Comments? Abuse? Help? Or maybe just tell me to give up and find a premade script somewhere. I'm getting sick of this very quickly. It's not at all cool.

ANYTHING will be highly appreciated.

Smacky_Wolf

EDIT: I already know frames are the devil... just bear with me...

Drakla

$GET and $POST refer to the arrays within a php script that are set when you send form data. Forms let you set the method GET OR POST. If you have a form element with the name 'username' and the form was submitted with POST, then in the php script will be

$_POST['username'] equal to whatever was typed in it. Use this as a simple demo

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
<form name="form1" id="form1" method="get" action="<?= $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] ?>">
  <input name="textfieldInGETForm" type="text" id="textfieldInGETForm" />
  <input name="checkboxInGET" type="checkbox" id="checkboxInGET" value="Oh, I'm a lovely checkbox" />
  <input name="submitButtonInGETForm" type="submit" id="submitButtonInGETForm" value="Submit" />
  &nbsp; This form uses the GET method&nbsp; type something, press submit, look at the url 
</form>
<form name="form1" id="form1" method="post" action="<?= $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] ?>">
  <input name="textfieldInPOSTForm" type="text" id="textfieldInPOSTForm" />
  <input name="checkboxInPOST" type="checkbox" id="checkboxInPOST" value="So - this is the post checkboxes value, eh?" />
  <input name="submitButtonInPOSTForm" type="submit" id="submitButtonInPOSTForm" value="Submit" />
&nbsp; This form uses the POST method&nbsp; type something, press submit, there's nothing extra in the url
</form>
<?php show_what_we_got(); ?>
</body>
</html>
<?php
function show_what_we_got()
{
		// go through the $_GET array and say what came aboard

	foreach ($_GET as $key => $value)
	{
		echo '$_GET[', $key, '] = ', htmlspecialchars($value), '<br />';
	}

	foreach ($_POST as $key => $value)
	{
		echo '$_POST[', $key, '] = ', htmlspecialchars($value), '<br />';
	}
}
?>

That's a simple as it gets. You might want to go DAFT - that's where I started, but it's a little out of date and still uses $PHP_SELF instead of $SERVER['PHP_SELF'] and $HTTP_POST_VARS instead of $POST, but it'll still get you going. Look at [MAN]foreach[/MAN] to see how that works with arrays, and as I bleat on about all the time, download the manual, I use the CHM version with user comments, and it's 10 times better than any book I've seen for learning php.

smacky_wolf

Dear god, this is hard for me to explain...

my PHP log for my host is here.
I use mySQL as my database.

I have already worked through a decent tutorial, but it was in german so I'm afraid I might have missed a few important bits.

Smacky_Wolf