Need Help with a Script.

Well i'm a big fan of 70's music, so I started a website relating to 70's music.

It has band profiles / artist profiles etc.

www.Awesome70s.com

So i've been researching bands and artist and making their respective profiles but i've come to realize this is alot of work. Now trust me i'm not lazy i've done lots of work for my other 3 sites. Is there anything I could do to make my job easier? I was thinking maybe something along the lines of a MySQL / PHP script thing, making it where all I would have to do is make a form have some fields hit send and it creates the .php and stores all the info in a mysql and displays it. Is this possible?

 

It'd be pretty easy to implement what your proposing.

You could create a database that holds all the profile information as you said and have some PHP files to manage it all.

It shouldnt take much to do it.

Just out of curiousity what are you doing at the moment? Creating individual html files?

 

Creating folders for every band /SoandSoBand/ and making index.php because I use php includes to control my layout. And I enter in the info manually.

 

Hi MediaHustler,

I've got a music review site that I really cut down development time on using some Dreamweaver extensions.

http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/Bundles/MXKollection/Overview/

If you go the php/mysql route, Interakt's MX Kollection would be a pretty sound investment I think. I used it to create the backend for my site which consists of a bunch of lists and forms for inserting reviews/artists/label info in my database. It saved me so much time that was spent creating content and design instead. Once you get the hang of the interface, you could bang out a simple admin backend in a well spent half hour.

With all the time you have saved, all you'd need to do is create php pages to handle the output. For example, I've got about 70 some odd artists in my database but only one core artist file for displaying different types of information pertaining to artists.

The end result could be something like you creating a bands.php page. Depending on url parameters you specify you can have awesome70s.com/bands/70s-band which, through a simple mod-rewrite rule, could point to bands.php?mode=profile&name=70s-band. Then it'd spit out the profile page you have set up in bands.php to show when those mode and name parameters are met.

At the same time, you could have awesome70s.com/band-list/A which through another mod-rewrite could point to bands.php?mode=list&letter=A, spitting out a list of bands in your database that start with the letter A, and formatting it based on your code in bands.php for when the mode and letter parameter criteria are met. Thats two different types of pages you can get from one php file.

There's a lot you can do to cut down on time spent entering information and creating pages and this is just what I found to be the fastest and most reliable for me. It all starts with getting a proper and secure admin backend sorted out in my opinion. Those Dreamweaver extensions are what did it for me, to each his own though.

Then plan out your content pages and test them over and over to make sure all is functional, make sure your url parameters are clean and secure when they go into your page, as well as when they go out into a link. All that done you could end up running most of the content out of just a few dynamic php files instead of a directory and pageset for each and every band.

Then its a cakewalk: login to your admin section and insert away. The time you saved up can now be used creating quality content.

Hope this helped out

 

Ive never heard of "Interakt's MX Kollection" ($299 - just checked) but yeah you should check it out. It would save you a lot of time - although you could go about hiring a programmer if you cant do it yourself and dont want to spend $299.

As Jim has already said a simple Mod_Rewrite would allow you to make the URL SE friendly and all you need is one php file to handle displaying the band profile.

Also do you know OOP? It would give you much more flexibility when it comes to displaying layout than just using includes.

I could help you out for a small fee - send me a PM if you're interested.

But yeah... You are doing a lot of work right now that you really dont need to do!

 

I'll have to take a look at that, Thanks.