how to implement a dynamic website?

a problem with a dynamic website

[eight8ball]

I have to implement a dynamic website for my client. There will be a dropdown menu(i use only css for that), where they want to add and edit stuff regularly. They also want to basicly add new pages on the site and link them to this menu. So what kind of content i should add to mysql database? Do you think it's reasonable to add this whole menu system to mysql database and just to add new database rows to be a new object for a menu? It's propably not too reasonable to put all the content to the database so decided to keep all pages(content) out of the database. Is that a reasonable solution?

Any tips would be preciated!

Thanks!

[andrewsmd]

You can do it with MySQL but if you want to avoid the whole database thing you could try templates. I had to do this a year ago and the basic logic of how I did it was actually quite simple. I just had a basic template of how the the website was laid out. I also created a form that was laid out the same way but with text boxes underneath each part. If the user wanted to add more content then they could in the textbox. I also found a nice little html editor gadget that was a gui based formatter for text but could generate the html so the user could bold stuff and things of that nature and then just paste the code in the appropriate box. For the menu you could have a special textbox they enter the URL and possibly the name and you create the link and add it to the page. How I added the stuff to the homepage was to just re-write a straight HTML file. Although the file itself is not dynamic the PHP re-writes it everytime the user adds things. Just have a login for the administrator so no one else can edit it. That's just how I did mine because I don't like MySQL, I would rather write files with PHP then grab stuff from a database. But, one of my co-workers did a dynamic website the way you are describing, it's a very common practice for a problem of this nature. Happy hunting.

[g1smd]

There are a lot of things to consider.

In the navigation - the URL for the link, and the anchor text; one of each for each page on the site.

For the content pages - the title and meta description, and the on-page content and images.