Building A Quick-And-Dirty PHP/MySQL Publishing System (
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Looking to quickly add a dynamic news page to your corporate or
personal Web site? This article shows you how, combining PHP's rapid
application development capabilities with a MySQL database to create a
primitive news publishing system and administration module in just under
four hours.In the highly competitive world of Web development, there's a crying need for
a
toolkit that allows developers to rapidly and efficiently construct dynamic,
robust and scalable Web sites. This toolkit needs to be feature-rich yet easy
to
use, cost-effective yet labour-efficient, simple yet scalable.
Now, I may
be biased or a fool (or maybe even both), but I'm going to go out on a limb here
and say that PHP is that toolkit.
Think about it. The language is fast,
robust and scalable. It's easy to use, comes with a great manual, and is backed
by an enthusiastic user community. It comes with a rich feature set, and
includes support for almost every new technology you can think of. It is, in
short, the best open-source scripting language available today.
This is
not just advertising. I've been using the language for over three years now, and
it still amazes me with its capabilities. Constructing a dynamic,
database-driven Web site in Perl would take me a week; with PHP, I'm done in two
days, and my code is cleaner, more readable and less convoluted than my best
efforts in Perl.
Now, if you're a cynical software programmer, all the
rhetoric in the world isn't going to convince you. You're not going to believe
a
word I say until you see the truth with your own eyes. And so, over the new few
pages, I'm going to demonstrate PHP's RAD capabilities by using it to build -
very rapidly - a simple content publishing system for a Web site.
Before
we begin, a little context. The application you're about to see was an actual
development effort I undertook a few weeks ago for an existing customer of my
company. This customer already had a PHP-based Web site, which we'd developed
a
year ago; however, it now required an addition, in the form of a dynamic,
database-driven page for corporate news and press releases. I was tagged as the
person to implement this addition.
I was told that the requirement was an
urgent one, and that the customer needed it "yesterday". Since time travel is
a
feat I have yet to master, I was forced to decline this deadline, and instead
promised to have something up and running in two days. This, then, is the story
of how I spent those two days.
