last edited file . . . ?

kargrafx

Hi! I am relatively new to this, and have taken on a project which may turn out to be beyond my capabilities. I am turning to a few forums like this for guidance and hep.

I am trying to create a website that is both 100% valid CSS HTML, and dynamically PHP driven. I have the stylesheet all set up, and have made a few HTML test pages that work fine with it. I then started creating php files to split this all up...

I have 'header.inc' which is the header information for all pages - this remains the same. I also have 'footer.inc' and 'sidebar.inc' which also remain the same for all pages. I then have each page load in the .inc files, as well as one or more txt files. The txt files are the content portions of the pages, that which is different. I was going to use xml files, but these will be edited by complete incompetents, so I thought txt would be best.

These text files have the title of the page(s) they appear in as e first line, comma separated if more than one. As of now, this information is simply ignored; you'll see why I have it later. On the next line there is a section heading. The rest of the file is the contents of that section.

So far, I hope I have it working in the best manner possible - if you know of a way to streamline my coding, I would appreciate advice. (It does seem to work, but better is always . . . better.)

My biggest problem is in a portion of that sidebar include. I want the capability to read all of those text files in the directory, and find out when they were last edited. Then I want to display a list of 'Recent Updates', including the title of the page, the date it was edited, the section heading, and the first 10 or 20 words of the section. The entire bit should be a link to the page it is included on.

As an example of what I have and what I want... I'll use the home page and a news page.

index.php, the home page, loads in the 3 include files for a header, sidebar, and footer. It scans the directory 'content' for text files named home#.txt (where # is 1, 2, 3, etc.). home1.txt contains the following;

Home Page
Welcome!
This paragraph is the text which welcomes new visitors to the website.
It has a few sentences about the website, and a few about the business.

home2.txt has the following;

Home Page
Mission Statement
This lists the mission statement of the company.

And so on. The news page (news.php) loads in the 3 include files for a header, sidebar, and footer. It scans the directory 'content' for text files named news#.txt...displaying as many news items as there are.

Now, let's assume that the last 5 updated text files are home2.txt, news24.txt, news25.txt, news26.txt, and news3.txt. In the sidebar, I was a small section that has a header 'recent updates' and prints out the following;

RECENT UPDATES

Home Page (January 5, 2007)
Mission Statement
This lists the mission statement of the...

News Page (January 6, 2007)
Article 24 Title
This is the contents of news article 24...

News Page (January 6, 2007)
Article 25 Title
This is the contents of news article 25...

News Page (January 6, 2007)
Article 26 Title
This is the contents of news article 26...

News Page (January 8, 2007)
Article 3 Title
This is the contents of news article 3...

And of course, each listing is a link to the appropriate page.

So hopefully I described what I want to happen adequately. I know it is beyond me at the moment, but I don't know how MUCH beyond me it is, if it is even possible. How do I read in the last modified date of the files, and compare them to determine the X most recently edited files? I think with that one bit solved, I can figure out how to make the structure as I want it... I hope!

Thanks!

Roger_Ramjet

You use the filesystem functions to read the file information etc.

kargrafx

Thanks for the pointer to the right direction, but I must be especially dense. How do I read in the last modified date for a given file? Once I know that, I can easily set it to scan through a directory and pick the X newest files (I think).

Roger_Ramjet

It is one of the functions so go read through them.

kargrafx

I found it, I think. Sorry for the confusion.

kargrafx

Okay, I just had someone make a suggestion to me from another forum, and I think it may actually be the smart thing to do; but I am not sure how to implement it so I am passing my questions on to you (and the other forums I've found)...

The suggestion was to pull the data out of text files, and make a SQL database. Instead of searching through the lines of a text file, I can just set fields for the database. Which makes perfect sense. I just don't know how to use SQL that well, nor how to interface it with PHP.

So to do what I want, I think I need several fields;
'key' (auto-increment ID#), 'page' (the page name the section is in),
'section h1', 'section h2', 'section h3', 'section p' (each corresponding to the same header/content tags),
and 'edited' (last date/time the entry was edited).

I'm working with it now, and am sure I can get such a table created. My problem is now in reading that in to the pages. What functions do I use to pull the data from a SQL table, and add the proper tags based on the field the info is in (H1 wrapping the H1 field, P wrapping the P field, etc.)? Right now I have the tags in the text files... I am not sure how to programmatically generate them.

What is the best/most efficient way to read the database entries and pull only the sections with the current page's name (I can write slightly different code for each page if needed - I am making separate pages for better search indexing)?

Thanks!

liquorvicar

The way to extract data using SQL is by using the SELECT statement.
A very simple example would be

SELECT field1,field2,etc FROM table WHERE field1='value'

You would then replace the lowercase words with the relevant names/values in your application.

Using PHP to access a database is a MASSIVE topic. I would strongly suggest getting on google and finding some tutorials to read through you familiarise yourself with some of the basics.

stolzyboy

assuming you'll be using mysql: http://us3.php.net/mysql

there you'll find all the functions you need to insert/update/delete records, view them, connect to mysql, select db, etc...

hth,
stolzyboy