Hi everyone! I'm in the process of creating a mid-sized poem site with PHP and MySQL. I want the site to be a similar in features to the milllions of lyrics sites out there (only without the garbage ads pasted all over the place ). The site is more of a learning project, and not a for-profit endeavor. So far I have done all the graphic layout, designed the database, and have a decent web-based CMS that will work for simple data entry into the database and such. So far so good. HOWEVER... these are the problems I am facing: ###Main Problem### How do the owner of those huge lyrics databases manage their pages? Do they have to create each .php page manually in a program like Dreamweaver, choose a filename, insert in a couple php variables so the page knows what information to draw from the database, and upload??? Forgive my ingnorance, but this seems to be terribly inefficient, but I don't know how they do it.... Any help would be greatly appreciated from any of you who are really good at .php or own similar type of sites that draw losts of information from databases... THANK-YOU SO MUCH!
No, they have an adminpanel linked to a database. The front end pages would be run via PHP cloaked by mod-rewrite to create the static looking .html pages.
OK, so exactly how is this done, and what kind of adminpanel would they use? I understand how they make the pages look like .html pages, just how they manage their webpages, urls, filenames, and header information on all of that.... ### The question remains... ###
To generate the pages, templates are used. Reduce the site down to basic pages. Your example: song lyrics ->artists index ->artist page ->Lyrics page. That's 3 pages. Use php to pull "variables", records from the db. Display on page using the data to setup the next level. This has the answers: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=683631 How does DP work? Start looking at the URLs for this site. Userids, threadids, even postids. Each of these corresponds to records in the database. PHP files use those ids to query the DB, and build the pages dynamically.
Yes, I understand that you have to break down the pages into basic page types. HOWEVER, if you have a generic poem author bio page script, how does it know what data to pull from the database? Does it mean you have to manually insert a couple php variables inside the page? Or do you have a CMS management script that automatically creates the page URL and filenames, title and meta tags, all at the same time when you add an author to your database? If that is the case, my CMS system will not be sufficient, as all I can do with it is add data to the database.