super slim cms?

cms

[NoClue]

Hi all,

I'm slowly getting familiar with all the amazing features of php, and once again confusion has struck!

What I want to do:
Update site with new content through a form, automatically creating flat html file (and update sitemap) (php, mysql)

How:
I've split content into 4 variables; Title, metatags, description and text and put these into a mysql database

With this it is easy to get content into a template or php file from the mysql database.

My question now is: can I get my page "index.php?page=widget123" displayed/output as "widget123.html"?

Ps What I've done before is create "widget123.html" and fill it with content through a database call. Now I would like everything done with 1 push of the button.

[mexicoshanty]

Do you want content to update at runtime or do you want to generate static html files that are updated whenever you decide?

If i were you i would use mod rewrite (an addon module for apache, except comes installed by default) to rewrite the url widget123.html to index.php?page=widget123. If the webserver you're working on is apache and it allows .htaccess to override rules, place the following rule in the .htaccess file in the document root.

RewriteRule ^(*)$ /index.php?page=$1

This way your visitors will be seeing widget123.html but it's really /index.php?page=widget123

[NoClue]

Hi Mexicoshanty,

thanks for the heads-up on mod rewrite! I'll dive into it again and figure out how it works.

You are referring to static html pages as well; this probably is better performance wise? I imagine I could have an automated job make static pages on the server which then can serve up already generated pages. Could you elaborate a bit?

thanks!

[jamie]

hi noclue,

wget is a useful tool for generating static copies of dynamic sites.

[mexicoshanty]

Yeah static pages would be better performance wise but it depends on how often your content changes and how much traffic you get to your site. Unless you're getting a thousand hits an hour then i dont see anypoint in generating static pages, you may as well take advantage of the server hardware and make your site more dynamic.

[NoClue]

Thanks, Jamie, Mexicoshanty,

since my site isn't drawing millions of visitors <cough> yet... ;-) I think I'll try and figure out how to mod rewrite my dynamic url to a more pleasing one, thanks for the help!