Advice on best solution

mathagat

Hello all,

Here is my scenario: We have a simple static page on the web site I work on for announcements and events. http://www.aumc.org/events.htm. New folks have joined on to help and it's been a nightmare trying to get everyone on the same page as far as the formatting of the copy. If you view that link soon enough, you will see what I'm talking about.

I am looking for a simple PHP based solution to help with updating this page. Basically what I want is similar to the way a blog works. I'd like to have a page that contributors to the site could go to and fill out a couple of fields like a title and a body. then submit this data and have it post to the announcements page at the top in an ascending fashion.

This seems like a simple enough thing to do. I just don't have a lot of PHP knowledge as far as whipping up a script on my own to do this. I have been having a hard time searching for such a solution. Maybe I'm not using the right vocabulary when searching.

Thanks!

Andrew_W_Peace

Well what you want to do is use a MySQL database. Make a form that submits to a PHP script. When that PHP script receives the data, it stores the data in the database. Then on the announcements page make PHP read from the database and display it in the correct order.

If you don't know how to do this yourself, search around in different forums for someone who will script it for you. This forum as well as ozzu.com are great places to find freelance developers.

Hope this helps!

mathagat

Thanks Andrew.

What I'd really love to find is a free script out there that has this functionality already built. Something I could customize to work for our site. I'm trying to get this done with a free solution such as that, if possible.

Thanks!

Andrew_W_Peace

Search around! Check this link. Some of these look pretty good.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=php+blog+software&btnG=Google+Search

mathagat

I followed this tutorial to create a html based form that passed on data to a PHP page which echoed the form data on that page. http://www.tizag.com/phpT/forms.php

It seems like this html form can easily be manipulated to have the input fields I would need. Would it be easy to get that PHP file to post that data in a spot on a different page? So that it is posted at the top of the page and the other previous posts are shifted down.

I feel like I'm getting it a little at a time. I can only wonder if I am close to the solution!

mathagat

Thanks for the search link Andrew. Believe me, I've been doing a lot of searching the past couple days. I'm just not sure I've been searching for the right thing. One of these simple blog scripts may just be exactly what I need. Thank you!

Rodney_H_

You may also benefit from checking out: http://wordpress.org/ It is really a state-of-the-art blog system, and, best of all, it is pretty much plug and play.

If you have time, and want to learn how to build a php/mySql blog from the ground up, this is a pretty good tutorial broken down into ten easy to follow steps: http://codegrrl.com/tutorials/cat_build_a_blog.php

mathagat

Rodney, thanks fo the link to the codegrrl tutorial. I'm going to follow those completely just to learn all there is to soak up there. Hopefully I will be able to figure out what I need to do for the site in the process.

Rodney_H_

🙂