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Building A Quick-And-Dirty PHP/MySQL Publishing System

Looking to quickly add a dynamic news page to your corporate or personal Web site? This article shows you how.

| RAD, Dude! |

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.

How to do Everything with PHP & MySQL
How to do Everything with PHP & MySQL, the best-selling book by Melonfire, explains how to take full advantage of PHP's built-in support for MySQL and link the results of database queries to Web pages. You'll get full details on PHP programming and MySQL database development, and then you'll learn to use these two cutting-edge technologies together. Easy-to-follow sample applications include a PHP online shopping cart, a MySQL order tracking system, and a PHP/MySQL news publishing system..