Getting started

[mrdavedog]

Hey folks,

Being the resident geek in my band, I've been tasked with revamping the band's website code. I know basic HTML, C & C++ so this shouldn't be too hard, but it's always nice to be pointed in the right direction.

The old site was a pain to update so my main goal is to keep it clean and easy enough to update that anyone in my band can do it. To that end I think templates and CSS are the way to go. I'd think it should be easy enough to separate the content from the layout. Let the members download a text file have them edit it then upload it and boom, site's updated. Correct?

The biggest hurdle will be creating a photo gallery, I know there are plenty of scripts out there that will do this, but what I'd like to aim for is for a band mate to be able to create a directory on the server upload the pictures to that directory, point the pictures page at that directory and have the page iterate the directory and create the page on they fly. Given that I don't have shell access to the server (only ftp). Is this ever possible? Can I use some DHTML or javascript mojo to make this work?

Any tips tricks or reality checks are welcome and I'm all about borrowing code, so if you know of any freely available scripts that can help, please point me in that direction.

Thanks!

-Dave

[Stephen Philbin]

Sounds to me like you just need a smidge of server side jiggery pokery. asp and php are the usual ones. Depends on the host which you'd use. Uploading lots of seperate images in one go might be a bit of an arse, browsers don't like it. Text should be fine though. If it's only simple stuff a database probably wouldn't be worth the effort, just use flat file and includes. That should cover just about cover it. There's another thread in here ("Dreamweaver tutorials" I think it's called.) check that out for the links to the html and CSS recommendations and you should be just about right. Oh yeah, and the validator. It's at the same place as the recommendations.

[mrdavedog]

Yeah I thought I might need some server side stuff. I tried a simple "hello world" in psp to no avail, so I'll give a look at asp.

Thanks!

[Stephen Philbin]

You'd have to make sure your host supports a server side language first. did you write the php correctly? Did it appear as text on the page? Did you give the file a .php extension?