controlling front end with php

[lennon123]

Hi guys,
I am fairly new to php but have a basic understanding of it.
What I want to create is a page that controls the content of an html-based news page. i.e a user would go to this page and be presented with a series of text feilds e.g name, news item,date posted etc...
Then when they click 'enter' the contents of a front end (uneditable) page is updated.
Am I right in thinking the process would be to have php store the intial user input in a variable save it to a .txt file. Then have some code on the front end saying include() blahblah.txt? I dont really know how to code this sort of thing.. if anyone could point me in the right direction then i would be grateful
cheers

 

[jpadie]

you're talking more about a database application. you can use a text file to hold the data, but it is advisable to store it in a structured form. flat text files can hold structured data, but it's best to use a tool that is designed for it (a relational database).

what you appear to be talking about is a simplified blogging application, however. why don't you take a look at wordpress. it's free to download, easy to set up and the code is opensource so you can learn from reading the code and working out how it is implementing the functions. an alternative opensource project is habari.

 

[lennon123]

brilliant... thank you for your quick response!
cheers

 

[southbeach]

And there is joomla as well, except that joomla is a CMS not exactly a blog but it could be used as such.