Looking for some suggestions from you pros!

Suggestion for an FAQ

[mikejson]

Good day all,

I'm kinda rebuilding someone's FAQ's. Previously they had a cgi implementation something like this.

1 page had 4 different topics, if you clicked on a topic it would go to the server and populate a page with topic one, moving the most frequently hit Questions to the top of the list, then sorted them by most frequently hit. Then if you clicked on a question it would bring up the question/answer on a page.

Now when I got here, the administrator gave me a notice that this was crashing the server. He didn't tell me why, just that I couldn't use those scripts anymore. So, I'm not sure why it worked for about a year, then just before I showed up here, it started locking the server up.... anyway

I was looking at making this in php. Do you think that this type of FAQ is too much overhead? Or would anyone like to suggest some way of doing this differently?

I would also have to have some type of dummy proof interface to the database of FAQs. It needs to be updated from time to time changing dates that cannot be forecasted. It also needs to be able to get additions. I think I got this part figured out, phpMyAdmin looks easy enough(having ran it by the boss yet, but I'm sure it's ok).

[panic]

I think they were just pulling your leg about the page crashing the server. Now unless the previous admin purposely put a nasty loop in the code in order to purposely put strain on the server, I don't see this being an issue.

However, I don't see why you'd HAVE to use PHP to do this, but phpMyAdmin is for administrating a MySQL database. I don't know why you'd want or need a MySQL database for FAQ's, but I think the best thing for you to do would be just to make it plain ol' HTML.

-panic

[vincevincevince]

depending on your skills in php this could easily be coded with a low load in php. i recommend using php to return a javascript empowered page that loads the Answer into a previously hidden div (?)

[mikejson]

panic: I need this to be populated from a database(hmm maybe I don't but...) so I can have some type of interface to the Q & A's. I need this interface to have virtually ZERO HTML in it. Just input question, answer, question type. That's it, the boss lady here wants all her pawns(which are dumb users, so to speak) to be able to update these Q&A's, and to add more. That is why I chose to go with SQL database and phpMyAdmin, which is fairly dummy proof, I just would have to set up some manual pages for them to reference while they are using the interface.

vince: Now as for the javascript thing, I'm not quite sure as to what your getting at. I don't think it would be effiecent to load the full Q & A from each topic at once and then showing them after. Each topic has about 40 questions in each(give or take 5). Do you think that is too much overhead? I want these pages to be as efficent as possible. If it is, then I can tell the admin to stick it up his yoohoo about the scripts crashing the server.