Entering text into a seperate page via a Form

gallion311

Whats up guys,

Newb to php, so I assume this is probably easy for most of you.

I'm doin' a site for a company who wants to enter in some News content themselves. They're not comfortable at all with html, so I'd like to create a simple form so they can enter data into a text box, click submit and that data (just news stories) gets sent to the body of the news section.

(The news section is in a table on the home page)

Is there a tutorial around that deals with a similar concept? Something I could learn and then use to create my own?

Or can someone offer a solution?

EDIT: As I think more about the ultimate result it may be a little more complicated.

The news they enter in will need to fit into an exact spot in the table (right under the header) and the date they enter needs to be in Bold.

So moreso than just throwing it into another page it needs to be in a table, centered in a specific cell, and formatted in some way.

Thanks,
ryan

wilku

What you're probaly looking for is some simple content management system (CMS).
Here's a link to a simple tutorial http://www.intranetjournal.com/php-cms/.
You will find more if you put "cms tutorial php" into google.

gallion311

Thanks Wilku, a content management system is definitaly along the lines of what I'd like to create, found some pretty decent tutorials out there.

The only problem is that all of the CMS tutorials I've seen are pretty advanced and mine (at least version 1.0) will be so much more simple that I can't seem to find a version that works.

For example, I'm not even planning on using a database to store the news stories, I'd just like to pass the data right through to a table in my homepage. This means the user won't be able to edit/view old stories, but again version 1.0 doesn't require that capability.

I wrote some code that sent data from a textbox into another blank html page, worked great...but now I need to find out how to enter this data into a specific table in that page, even a specific cell. Can I do that based on the table ID?

Based on those requirements do I really need to use a database, or can I just print the data right into another page?

Roger_Ramjet

Basically what you are saying is that you would like them to be able to add to the contents of an otherwise static html file.

2 ways with php and the filesystem functions, you could open the existing file and write to it, just adding your new contents and the tags for css to format it, or you could create a new file which is pulled in from the folder by php at runtime. You would end up with a set of html fragment files that would need to be pulled in using creation date order, so that last option is the least efficient and more complex option.

Personally I would use file_get_contents and file_put_contents to add the input to the beginning of an include html fragment file. The file would be included into the main page at runtime, css handles position and format. The file will just get bigger and bigger so you need to think about that. You can use html comments as markers to locate where each news item begins and ends, or the <div> tags that you will be using anyway.