Creating static pages from a database

For my most recent project I will be creating a sign-up sheet that will generate static pages when the information is entered. The reason the pages will be static is so they can be crawled by search engine spiders. A spider cannot read dynamically created pages because it only looks at what is stored on the server and that would be the php script which is not friendly at all to them. The only block of information that I will not have to store in the database is the text block because it will only be written out to the pages for that particular user. The rest of the information will have to be called from other pages.

Creating the page for the vendor is easy (if you've used xtemplates before). Its just a matter using xtemplate function xtpl->assign() to replace the text block and other info where it is needed.

The first mildly challenging aspect I encountered was the multiple select list where the user can choose multiple options with ctrl-click as so:
Select an optionoption1option2option3


This data has to be stored somewhere and the most difficult part was getting the array to pass to the php script. In my script I had:

if(isset($cities)){
  foreach($cities as $value){
   $query="INSERT IGNORE INTO `***` (`user`, `cities`) VALUES ('".$user_name."', '".$value."');";
   mysql_query($query) or die('Failed to update user to cities: '.mysql_error());
  }
 }

< br />
Which I was sure would work but I kept getting an error on my foreach statement. After some research on html forms I found that the value to be passed as an array to a script had to be defined as name="my_name[]". Html needs the [] to show the script that it is an array otherwise it will just pass the first value. Obviously a foreach() statement won't work on an non-array type so this is why that code was breaking.

The next bigger challenge I have is to create site maps to all of these pages being created and also create links on the bottom of the user's page to some pages from other users, based on group, as kind of a minimap. Again all my pages have to be static so php cannot reside on the page and call the database. I looked into the Apache server mod_rewrites and there is no way to create a static page with php on it. My first idea was to write a script to parse the php pages using the ob_start() function which will store all proceeding information on an internal buffer which is sent to the browser's buffer on ob_end_flush(). This buffered content (which will now be parsed by the browser) can be stored in any string. I was then going to take this content and write it to a new .html file under the same name. This takes a lot of time because of the amount of pages being created and buffered and space because I would have to keep the .php file in the event the database was updated I would have to update the .html.

But then I got an idea which was much simpler and straight forward and would save all the extra work from my previous idea. My idea is to not even put the php on the page in the first place. I can just use the xtpl->assign('var', 'content') function here as well and put the php code in the content as xtpl->assign('var', 'php_code'). The browser will parse the php code before it gets sent to the xtpl function saving me a lot of work. The only thing I need to do now is to make my code more modular so I can write a script to update the pages using this philosophy every so often for when the database is updated.

On Using Templates

I am starting a project for SEOWeboworks in downtown Plymouth as my first real work experience. I am working a test project they want me to work on before I start doing actual work. The project uses a templating structure that will auto-generate similar web pages for their Ticketing website replacing the artist's name on each page. I have tried using php classes with the str_replace() function but that failed. It recognizes the variable I want to replace and the variable I want to replace it with but somehow replaces it with blank space. The following was my attempt:

class template {
//this template will replace {artist} with the artist's name
var $template;

//This method will import the contents of the template file into the template property of the class
function load_tpl($filename) {
$this->template = file_get_contents($filename);
}

//This method will replace the tag_names found in the template with the given replacement data
function parse_tags($tag_name, $replacememt) {
$this->template = str_replace($tag_name, $replacement, $this->template);
echo "replace ".$tag_name." with ".$replacememt;
}

//This method will output the contents of the template file to the browser
function output() {
echo $this->template;
}
}
?>

and that failed

So now I have decided to try XTemplates and we'll see how that goes.

Update:
So the new XTemplate setup is working props to Peter for the tips on how to use it. Here it is:


include_once('xtemplate.class.php');

//load new xtemplate
$xtpl = new XTemplate('artist_page.xtpl');

//this template will replace {artist} with the artist's name
$artist=$_POST["artist"];
$xtpl->assign('artist', $artist);

//output new page
$xtpl->parse('main');
$xtpl->out('main');
?>

definitely much simpler than the previous code block.

Now on to add more functionality!