Am New to Web Designing... Need help with a work project

bmthlad

Hi there,

I am working on a website at work for them, and I have an idea that would i think in the long run make tings easier to manage on uploading files.

Basically it is a schools website, and we are putting on there in the Info for parents area, all the letters that the school sends out to the students.

It is currently in PHP so that they show up on the page as soon as the file is added to the Directory called letters!

Waht i am looking to do, is have it sort via the file name so that the following happens

if it starts with 07 - then it shows in Year 7 letters, 08, then shows in year 8 letters etc... if it starts with 12 then it shows in Whole School.

I would also like it to then work on the date so that if the date the letter was sent out was over say 60 days from the date of viewing on the site, then it would go into the Letters Archivwe (again for Year 7 - 11 / whole school) and if it was within the 60 days then it would be in the current letters.

We are saving our docs as PDF's for the site.

So the filename would look something like

07_29-01-08_Teacher Training Date Change.pdf.

Can someone tell me if this is possible and what the code is likely to be. As i have said i am new to this and dont knwo where to start.

Many thanks

Bmthlad

rulian

realistically, this is a job more for data bases then file name convention structure.
Although you could do it the way you want to, and if you arent dealing with anyone who can enter information into a database even via CMS then your approach would seem more practical, although no where near as secure or dynamic.

You will need however, to do some pretty extensive coding to decode the files via by name convention and determine when and where they shoudl go and for how long.
Your naming convention should allow for some additional info, and multiple years if you arent looking to upgrade anytime soon, and be sure to stay 100% consistant with what you design.

To give you an example, lets seperate your variables with underscores _ ,
now your filenames cannot be like that_school because it would count that as a variable as well. so be sure to pick a character you wont use, and keep a consistant format.

But I would look into also taking up mysql if you have the time and patience,
but to be honest this is probably not a project you want to start with if it needs to be up quick and secure.