Not sure how to do this(really long sorry)

[jpoladsky]

I am completely redoing my family's real estate company website. Right now its a very simple, but some what functional site that is strictly HTML.

Here is a link to the current website.

The problem with the current site is I am the only one who knows how to make simple changes, such as adding/removing properties, and updating contact information.

Also, a large part of their business is managing rental properties. Right now they have around 120 properties, but foresee having hundreds of properties in the near future. So in order to keep their online rental listings easy to update I am going to need to create a database for all of the properties.

To solve the first problem I am going to need to create an administrative application. So what I am thinking is you go to something like:

http://www.realviewresidential.com/adminlogin.php

from their you login using a specific username and password
then you have a menu giving you the options to:

View/Edit/Add/Delete Sales Properties
View/Edit/Add Rental Properties
View/Edit/Add/Delete Contact information

I have a pretty good idea about how to go about creating that aspect of the website, once I have the database set up.

I think my biggest challenge is I don't really know how to set up the database for the listings and how the information should be stored and also how to attach multiple images to one listing.
Ideally how I would see it to be set up is when you go to the available properties in say the rental section. Every property will have its own little listing similar to the ones we currently have on the site (click here to see).
Only the new ones will obviously be dynamicly generated using the database. Every listing will have a brief description, an image, and a link to a flyer that is generated everytime the link is opened.
Something similar to this.
Other functions on the listing page such as searching by city or zip code etc will be added.

I just am not sure how to go about where and how to manage all of the images. Obviously you can't keep all of those images directly on the database, but how do you get a listing to know where and what images are associated with it. I don't know why but how to make this work escapes me, and I am seeking some advice from some one with more databasing experince.

[JVassie]

Hi there,

I had a brainwave about how you could go about it, one of the gurus might have something better up their sleeve however.

Aside from the main tables, you could have another table, with two columns.

Picture ID - Unique Auto Increment
Picture Link - full link to the picture in question

Then you could have foreign keys in your other tables linking each property to several pictures (picture1, picture2, etc)

Then you can call the link by getting the appropriate IDs from the picture table, and place the link in the appropritae part of a <img> tag.

Hope that helps a bit.