RE: [PHP] From static to dynamic

I've been asked by a few to explain further what I'd like to do. I'd like to accomplish the entire 183-page site with 2 pages: the home page and a catalog template. The home page, which features an item-of-the-day from the catalog and past 3 featured items, would choose a random item from the database once each day. The past 3 featured items would be updated accordingly. Following any of the 20 links to various sections of the catalog would return page 1 of x pages of that section of the catalog. Each catalog page would display a maximum of 9 items with Next and Back buttons when needed. The basic layout of the catalog template is a 3x3 table. Additional questions: 3. I'd rather not spend the time developing an administrative interface for managing the content of the catalog right now. How difficult will it be for me, a typical customer of a typical web hosting service, to manage the content by other means? Can the database reside within my html docs dir, where I can access it? If so, can I download, modify, and upload it as needed? 4. Am I likely to find anyone here that might be interested in taking this on in exchange for a brand-new color Casio Wrist-Camera? Anyone interested in seeing (sent privately) some pictures I took with the older black & white model? It's so cool. Steven -----Original Message----- From: Steven Katz <steven@idma.com> Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 7:03 PM To: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: [PHP] From static to dynamic I have a site which consists of a few hundred catalog pages. The items in the catalog are pictured 9 to a page with accompanying descriptions. The homepage features an item-of-the-day, as well as the past 3 featured items. The entire site is static and regularly updated manually by me. I don't believe it'll take much to fully automate the site, which is what I plan to do, or have done, over the next week or so. Now for my questions: 1. The dynamically-generated pages must remain indexable by search engines. That is, indexing robots must be able to crawl the entire site by following the various links to all of the catalog pages. Do the strings that are passed through the URL appear to search engines as dynamic, and therefore get ignored? 2. It's important that the site remain easily portable from one host to another. I have no plans to move it, but it would be nice to know that it would be a simple matter of plunking it down somewhere else if I needed to. Is there any advantage to using a flat file over mysql in terms of portability? How significantly would performance be affected, considering that it's not likely there will ever be more than 1000 catalog items (rows)? I'd be interested in hearing how you'd put this together. Steven