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Whackamole
05-20-2006, 12:14 AM
Hi everyone I am new to the boards so I hope I word all of this correctly. I am a first time web developer and am using Yahoo's site builder to get my initial build up and running. Yahoo has limited provisions for building a search engine to retrieve results from from within your own website and are weird about 3rd party scripting etc. Long story short I have been trying to build it with just HTML coding and am about to pull my hair out. Here is the engine I am attempting to build, your guidance would be much appreciated I can even name my first born after you if need be.

The fields would be as follows:
1. Business Name (fill in)
2. Category (drop down menu)
3. City (fill in)
4. State (fill in) * only required field

I am also adding in a maximum results per page but am having no trouble with that part. My idea is to build a hidden database within my site with a list of all businesses listed and set that page as the designated page for the engine to search. Then a seperate page where the results would be returned, problem is I do not know the coding for results pages. I would like the results to appear in the order listed above what coding do I need to do to make this happen? Also what coding do I need to use on my database so the engine knows a state is a state and a city is a city and so on? I hope this makes some semblance of sense.

Oooh as if this message isn't already 3 miles long one other question. All my fileds are coming out the exact same length which I am ok with except state is only a 2 letter abbreviation and looks kind of odd in a long text field. How can I control the size of the text field? I promise I am done now. Thanks :D

the tree
05-20-2006, 11:34 AM
First up, throw away Yahoo Site Builder. You will need notepad or better to do this.

Secondly, forget any ideas that you had about using HTML to run an engine of any sorts. You might want to remind yourself of what HTML is.

Third, you'll need to find out from your host what you have in the way of server-side scripting and database support.

Fourth, but a few million places from last, you'll need to learn a whole new language.