Database Driven Websites

**star** · 10-19-2003, 06:46 PM

Hi, Chris asked me to publish our short email
communication to the benefit of all readers in
the forum :

"Hi, Chris

Well, first of all I must say that your site is
a very useful resource. Now to my issue, I would
like to create a database driven site, looked at
your literature site and finally learned that
you are only using about half a dozen php files
to create 13.000 "pages".

Is it not still an enormous task to fill all
those 13.000 database records or is there any
automated job involved (or just a few hundred
database records) ?...."

He gave a pretty enlightening explanation then:

"Databases are scalable. It doesn't matter if you have
1000 records or 30000, the programming is the same.

When thinking of a database driven site think of HTML
like an empty glass. You can fill that empty glass with
grape juice, wine, water, soda, it doesn't matter, you
only need one glass.

So with a single HTML file (or PHP file in this case) you can
make a page about grapes, oranges, apples, bananas, it
doesn't matter.

What you do is pass an argument to the file telling it
what information to display.

http://www.example.com/script.php?fruit=banana

So you're telling your script to pull the information
on the fruit "banana" from the database, which it
then displays...."

Thanks

**star** · 10-19-2003, 06:54 PM

However what I do not quite understand concerns the
database itsself. To create 13000 unique content pages
one needs to fill as many database records manually (?) .

How could that be humanly possible, or again am I missing
the point here completely ?

In the meantime I have heard of "possible" pages of a certain
amount in other forums. So let us use an example :

50 database records (of any kind)

How many unique website pages are possible here ?
And what about the potential problem of spamming the
search engines ?

Any feedback is appreciated....

Thanks

**Chris** · 10-19-2003, 08:34 PM

Yes, the data entry needs to be mostly manual (sometimes automated scripts can do it if you have a current data source).

You shouldn't expect to create 13,000 records overnight, my site that has that many took 2-3 years to get that large.

There is no spam issue with database driven websites.

**johnn** · 10-20-2003, 01:33 AM

Plus each page should be unique and optimized for search engine. Just look at the yellow page directory, each page is unique though it contains known data. It's possible to create thousands of pages, no spamming.

**star** · 10-20-2003, 12:46 PM

Okay, thank you.

**KeithMcL** · 10-21-2003, 02:53 PM

The one major drawback about db driven sites is that not all search engines will index dynamic pages. Google does. I'm not sure about Yahoo, AltaVista or the others.