Databasing an existing website

[ewan_mackie]

Hi all,
I am in charge of a school website which is pretty constantly updated. I am considering converting the site from a static format to a more dynamic format as the number of pages involved is becoming an issue.

A typical page would contain 500 words and some images. My question as a beginner with PHP etc is how to store this text in the database ?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

As well as hopefully making my job easier, I am interested in learning PHP and MySQL.

Many thanks

Ewan Mackie

[Anon]

Ewan,

Use the type "MediumText" because of the amount of text in the pages. Good luck with it!

Terry

[Anon]

Buy "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Wellington & Thomson, published by Sams, ISBN 0-672-31784-2. It leads you through just about everything you need to know. If you're only looking to work with text in the database you don't even need to read the whole book, the first 250 pages or so will lay everything out for you.

Beyond that, biggest tip I can give you is to lay out your tables very carefully and make sure you know how they're going to interact. It will save you HUGE amounts of time later if you take time to prepare them correctly beforehand.