[RaiTid_R]

Even though I've been dealing with PHP for years... I still consider myself a newbie because I can only manipulate PHP... and understand what needs to do what (and only a limited understanding and manipulation) but am unable to actually create. Which is what I wanted to change.


So I'm working on this new project of mine and I want to to be driven with PHP. But I don't want to use any unnecessary php which is why i didn't go with CMS or anything like that.


All I want to start is a way to keep members in a database with limited information. But only members that will be related to the news script.


It may not even need a database but I will try to enlighten the reader of this posts as to what I desire to accomplish.


If possible the news to be kept in a text file to save DB usage is fine by me. But... I'd like it to be able to recognize a posting author.

So if I log in and post something... the news will be added to a pre-defined table maybe via the phpinclude function. And it will add the news in a table of it's own.

2 Rows 2 columns. THe top row in the left column shows the assigned avatar of the author. In the right... the name and post time / date.

The bottom row will have merged columns and the text for the news will be placed in there.



I see it as being very doable and extremely simple. But I could be wrong. The reason I lead away from keeping the users out of a DB and the News is because I want to separate sections of the site in categories and the likes... but less i confuse someone that's a new project a different day. I want to focus on making the above described a reality.


It may already have been done... 100 times over... but I'd like to do it myself. If I could be pointed into the right set of directions. Maybe a news posting tutorial where the news is stored in a text file and has a user panel of a sorts. As well as making it function to direct to a specific place and perform the table functions I desire.

Or I don't know... Help Please

[YourPHPPro]

Have you settled on a templating engine and a db abstraction engine ? Those two things would definately help you get started. My choices would be Smarty and ADOdb.

Once that is done, then I would work on the database schema so that it could hold all of the data that I had for it. Then, it is designing the screens (login, latest news, main index, main admin, wrong password, email password, register, individual post, extended post, etc).

Once you get to this point, 80% of the work has been done, you simply code the DB queries, load the templates, replace variables in the templates, and output the pages - for all the actions that you want to occur.

That's probably backwards compared to what some people would tell you - just get in there and start coding... - but it prevents you from being suprised - you want it to store THAT in the DB ? - and in my experience, results in a completed application much quicker.

[RaiTid_R]

I don't know about Templating or DB extraction specifically for news posting or php in general.

I has assumed you could get by with html in echo tags and forget the template. As far as DB extraction... that would be totally new to me. You can use php to pull information from a db... so I'm lost there.



So let's just assume that I have a news posting script that posts the values into a database. And I have a script that pulls news from a database. (I don't however, there are many tutorials for creating one to go into a text file... but I haven't looked extensively for database integration)

How would I get the script that pulls news to insert it into a format like...

-----------------------
|Avatar|Posted By Info|
-----------------------
|News----------------|
-----------------------

[YourPHPPro]

Check out:

http://smarty.php.net/crashcourse.php

http://php.weblogs.com/adodb_tutorial

They give good examples of how you could do what you want more efficiently then "html in echo tags"...

[RaiTid_R]

I appreciate the guide in a particular set of directions. But I think I'm going to save that information until I become a little more proficient with all the php values and the likes.

As stated... i've manipulated code from simple forms to bbs and cms. But I've never "Created" it. So I don't know where either of those would apply in a news script.

I'll stick with php extensions and just use HTML and insert as I go along. Tedious and annoying... but only available option.