Allow user to edit an area of text

[chinrub]

I'm trying to allow a user to update protions of their site with no html knowledge whatsover. Any html pages to be used in the site have already been created. For this I've been trying to create something like a basic cms.
So far I've created a script, which will allow a user to edit an entire text format file, such as the html document. But i've decided that I dont want the user to be able to edit any of the html code.
I've been looking around and thought that something like this

<textarea id="user_edit_area1" name="textarea1">Some text thats already there and requirs changing</textarea>

could help me. Would I be able to store the contents of a specific text area in a variable using its id as reference? Then when it comes to updating the file, how would i load the new text into the html file.
Would the pre-created html files now need to be php files so i can include the variable within the code?

I'm confusing myself with this one... any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Houdini]

For HTML and PHP tags you might want to look at strip_tags()

[chinrub]

thanks for the quick reply

I'm not sure if i explained myself right.
What I wish to do is just allow a user to edit the text that appears within a defined <textarea>. Perhaps by using $_POST[textarea1] to store the contents in a mySQL database.

What is also confusing me is how I'd get the html files that have already been created to display the sql result. I know i'd store the result of the query in a variable, perhaps $textarea1.

But would I now have to go through all of the html files, convert them to php files and include something like...

print '$textarea1';

...where i want the code to be outputted.

I'm not sure if strip_tags() is going to help me for that.