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());
  }
 }

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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.