Opinion needed from those more experienced....

[Anon]

My boss and I were just going over the layour of the database and the forms to
make the changes and request information from the database.

He suggested we make an html generator, put all the possible form fields we'd be using throughout the site and then this way, just pull them out of the database with their stored values and types and such.

I say we should use a regular html editor so we can manage the layour more
effectively, and the amount of of time it would take (for me, anyway) to make such an html generator, I'd be done with all the forms.

What's the opinion out there?

[Anon]

Depends if you expect your site to grow much or not.

If you think that the site will remain reasonably unchanged over time , then just doing the html has no downside as such.

But if you suspect that you will be adding pages/resources to the site, do it from the DB - you will be amazed once you get the db set up , how fast and easy it is to create new content in a matter of minutes. Plus , if any of the data is shared across pages you can edit/ammend it all at once, assuming you do not already include() sections etc.

IMHO the hard work (and it aint that hard really) of setting up the DB and relative queries to generate the pages, is all worth it the first time you see that 'created' page pop into existence!