Build Your Own DatabaseDriven Website Using PHP amp;amp; MySQL [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Summary

There are a few minor tasks that our content management system is still
not able to handle. For example, it's currently unable to provide a listing
of all jokes that don't belong to any category—something
that could come in very handy as the number of jokes in the database grows.
You might also like to sort joke listings by various criteria. These particular
capabilities require a few more advanced SQL tricks that we'll see in "Advanced SQL".

If we ignore these little details for the moment, you'll see that you
now have a system that allows someone with no SQL or database knowledge to
administer your database of jokes with ease! Together with a set of PHP-powered
pages through which regular site visitors can view the jokes, this content
management system allows us to set up a complete database-driven Website that
can be maintained by someone with absolutely no database knowledge. And if
you think that sounds like a valuable commodity to businesses looking to get
on the Web today, you're right!

In fact, only one aspect of our site requires special knowledge (beyond
the use of a Web browser) to use: content formatting. For example, it would
not be unusual for someone to want to enter a joke that contained more than
one paragraph of text. In our current system, this could be accomplished by
entering the HTML code for the joke directly into the "Create New Joke" form.
Why is this unacceptable?

As we stated way back in the introduction to this book, one of the most
desirable features of a database-driven Website is that the people responsible
for adding content to the site need not be familiar with HTML. If we require
knowledge of HTML for something as simple as dividing a joke into paragraphs,
we have failed to achieve our goal.

As a bonus in this chapter, you also learned a little more about arrays
in PHP. You learned how a set of form elements can submit their values into
a single array variable, and you learned how to process that array on the
receiving end by looping through it with a while loop,
a for loop, and a foreach loop.

In "Content Formatting and Submission", we'll see how we can
make use of some features of PHP to provide a simpler means by which we can
format content without requiring site administrators to know the ins and outs
of HTML. We'll also bring back the "Submit Your Own Joke" link to our site,
and discover how we can safely accept content submissions from casual site
visitors.