Concepts: Simple News Posts

mijokijo

I'm learning PHP, a newbie, novice, what have you. I'm trying to do some relatively simple stuff, and I posted my problem with titles in the PHP5 forum (which I never got any decent help on), and now I'm moving to making a simple news posting script.

The problem I've run into is in the implementation. How would it work? Would I store a whole post inside a database record? Doesn't seem like the best use of a database. Do I make new files for each post? How would I do that? Is there anybody that can give me some ideas as to how I could go about implementing a news posting script? If I could get ideas for multiple ways to do so that would be nice, so that I have an idea of my choices.

planetsim

Nothing wrong with storing an entire post in a database.

However the toughest thing really with making a new System is deciding how the news posts and any additional data that will be required will be stored. Do you want news posts stored in the database? Or would you prefer a flat file system which stores them.

There are many issues and the one that stares straight out is speed. Your flat file system will start getting bogged down with the more posts there are, while a database will be the same speed roughly each time so no dramatic decreases in speed which will be found with the flat file system although this will also depend on how the flat file system is structured.

IMHO, Database is the way to go my news system I have uses the Database intensively. If you go to my site you can download it and see how one is implemented it is quite complex to probably what you want but it should give you an idea, the other is cute news this one uses the flat file system from the last I remember, I personally dislike this system hence why I developed my own however it should give you an idea on what is different between the two.

mijokijo

I never favored the flat-file approach, for the same reasons, but I can't conceptualize how I would implement the database-driven approach. To have the whole post stored in the database would, in my opinion, be related to storing a image file in a database. Modern databases can do that, but really you shouldn't because databases aren't meant to store images. Maybe I'm making a wrong comparison?

planetsim

Whats wrong with storing an entire news post in the Database, it should only be text that has been validated to be safe to be put in. Although images can be stored within the Database as BLOBs it can cause data corruption but that is beside the point. Your news posts wont contain images in that sense but rather text which could be HTML or what have you.

mijokijo

I guess so. I need to get to work then...