Forums | MacLife

So i can use Dreamweaver to publish the template (layout) and then make a database where all the data is retrieved to produce the content (Images, information). Is this how it works or am i off the road in a tree?

So i can use Dreamweaver to publish the template (layout) and then make a database where all the data is retrieved to produce the content (Images, information). Is this how it works or am i off the road in a tree?

I wouldn't use the term "publish", it can make pages, help write html and manage sites.

What Tony said is on the money.  DW will help, but the database stuff is very cookie cutter, and the effort that it takes to learn how to make DW do what you want would be better spent just learning to code.l

Yeah, what he said.  Some of my pages are so dispersed between PHP and HTML code that I couldn't imagine using a WYSIWYG editor for them.  A virutal prerequesit for good PHP programming is doing your HTML by hand.  The markup will be better, too.

Or, if you have a background as a programmer in more traditional languages (most notably C, C++, or Java) then PHP should be easy to pick up.  I've learned most of what I know about PHP from disecting Dreamweaver's generated code, making my own changes and reading the PHP.net manual.

Well i have MySQL all up and going and i was wondering where it stores its databases? and what is its root location? I have figured out that the dir
/usr/local stores most of the critical files but i still cant seem to locate the storage dir for the databases. Also how do you know if you database has been saved.
Guys and Girls.. PHP and MySQL are sure dynamic!

I'm confused about what you are asking.  If you perform an operation with a query, baring an error, the change is made.  You don't have to choose to save, it saves everything you do automatically.

The databases are stored in /usr/local/mysql/$databasename where $databasename is the name of the specific database you are interested in.  You should not ever need to touch these files.  Although, I suppose you could back them up if you wanted to (but easier methods of backing up a database exist, like performing a dump.)

Getting phpMyAdmin at http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ will help you set up your databases and perform some simple operations without writing any code.  It's not intended as a regular method for administration, but rather as a catch-all so that you don't have to write everything yourself.  To backup a database using this, open your database, then your table and export structure and data (which will dump a text file script of SQL code that will recreate your database for you on any SQL server.)

Note: From what i have gathered a database is where information or the page content is drawn from! Meaning you create a page and instead of linking an image to its location - as such "<img src="/Graphics/image1.png">, you link it to a dbase which in turn retreives the image to display on the page.

Correct me if i'm wrong...

That is wrong.

A database is just that, a base of data.  HTML does not talk to it or link to it in any way.

Let me see if I can illustrate it.  Say you have a data base that is full of names and phone numbers and states.   You have a page that you want to display all the names and phone numbers of the people in Montana.

With php you write a query something like this:

SELECT * FROM address_db WHERE state = 'Montana"

You utilize php to send that query to the database, and for example you have it return the data in an array.  You then can have php loop through that array and write the HTML that is sent to the browser.

That is pretty generic, but there are many ways to do it depending on your needs and setup. 

In the case of images, you can store the binary data in the database and write it to the browser, but more often you will just store the path to the image, and write that to the page.

Once again, all interaction with the database is done with a scripting language, HTML has nothing to do with it.