Easily contented
Content management for sites needn’t be complicated. This site uses MySQL as its basis but retains a file copy of the entry as well.
Blog sites will use something similar and I have been testing SixApart’s MovableType locally for development purposes and this is also based on MySQL. The difference being, making something which fits all needs is much more difficult to achieve than something bespoke for one site. I struggled for some time to install everything while updating Perl modules for MySQL along the way. Step two will be to make something in CSS which fits my own style. Step three will be to try installing on another webhost.
My offering to sites has been to use a simple text file based system which checks an existing file for a page, opens the text file for editing using PHP and then on updating saves a backup of the opened file before replacing the main text file with a newer and updated version.
The visible page is still styled like the rest of the site but is reading line-by-line from a text file using a few lines of PHP.
All in all, the system is lightweight and effectively allows simple text formatting, links and updates within one form. The only changes in general need to be the location of the document root and the names of pages which need updating.
Once I am entirely happy with the code I will publish it in full here for perusal. In the meantime, I have updates to make.
