Website organization

[evilsanta]

Ok, Ive been working on my site www.nzgames.org for quite sometime now, but there are some things I want to add, specifically I am going to be needing a better way to handle content as seen here http://www.nzgames.org/articles/

I just have directories for different things, however I see websites that have things like... "Organize by letter" or "Organize by date" like this http://www.codersworkshop.com/viewshowcase.php I also want the ability to allow users to rate/reply to things in the showcase, as seen here http://www.codersworkshop.com/viewshowcase.php?id=740 , I use PHPBB for a forum and I can already check to see if they are logged in and also get their Username, so I just want a really simple post system...

Are my terms correct in that I need a content management system? B/c I have taken a look at some and they all seem like they have too many features for what I need...

Any help would be appreciated. 🙂

[theelectricwiz]

You probably won't need something as complex as a CMS. You could simply create a database in mysql or similar to store the articles (maybe store the actual html in a text field or just store a link to the article), their ratings, views etc in. Once you had the database, you can easily add the things you need

[greenie2600]

You definitely don't need a CMS.

I'm assuming that your articles are stored (or at least indexed) in a database, and that your index page simply queries that database table to generate the list of article links.

To sort your articles differently, you just need to use different SQL queries - e.g.:

SELECT id, title, author, abstract, date FROM articles ORDER BY title
SELECT id, title, author, abstract, date FROM articles ORDER BY date
SELECT id, title, author, abstract, date FROM articles ORDER BY author

...etc.

So add links to your page that say "Sort by Date" or "Sort by Author" or whatever - or even add a search form, if you want to allow users to search for articles that match specific criteria. Those links will point back to the same page, but with variables in the querystring - e.g., "index.php?sortby=date".

Then, add some PHP code to the page that looks at the querystring, determines which column to order by, and constructs the appropriate SQL query.