File opening, writting and location

I'm a newbie to PHP and the web. I've been programming in VB for about 3 years and XBase for about 15. I would like to place a bunch of text files in a directory and have a PHP script pick them up and place the top X lines in a center section of a page followed by a MORE link. It would do this for Y number of articles. The remainder it would title with the first x characters and place it on the right of the screen (like an archive) I know that I can use a function similar to fopen in XBase to access the text files and extract the lines. In Xbase, I would traverse the directory, extract the lines, place the X characters in a string followed by a "More". If anyone can steer me in the right direction, I would appreciate it. I don't get how you place things on the page in a given area. I'm using Dreamweaver 4 templates. Anyone have any suggestions..... Thanks in advance... Jerry