News Content from Texts uploads

**wrathyimp** · 09-24-2012, 06:59 AM

Hi,

I am new to the web development, my client is looking for a simple way to upload news to his website (static/HTML), were he just upload a text file with his news content, and his site updates the news pages, basically in 3 different areas: News Portlet (Home Page), Our News page, And the News Page itself.

SO if he uploads file like "news17.text" it will be the latest news, which will be shown on the home page with link (read more) to the news page, and will also have similar content on the our news page with read more link.

So how can i make such a setup, through googling i have understood, in need ajax, or server-side includes; but I am not getting exact scripts that helps me in my scenario.

Thanks

**bernie1227** · 09-24-2012, 07:30 AM

one option, is to use php to open the textfile and print out it's contents onto the site.

**wrathyimp** · 09-24-2012, 10:06 AM

Is there any script for it. I dont know any thing on PHP.

**bernie1227** · 09-24-2012, 11:18 AM

You'd just use the fopen function on the file and then echo the contents into a div

**wrathyimp** · 09-24-2012, 11:29 AM

But then I have to change all my sites from .html to .php

**djr33** · 09-24-2012, 01:21 PM

Yes, you would. But it's worth it. That's the best way to do this. PHP isn't the only option. ASP, SSI and a few others are possible as well. It depends on what you want to learn and what is available on your server. PHP is most likely to be available and useful to you, but it's up to you (and your server).
Also, I'd probably look into putting all of this into a database if I were you, but that's not necessarily required if this content isn't going to change very often and you don't mind managing the files as you've described.

You could use Ajax instead, but it might actually be more difficult.

Simply put, you're going to learn something new in order to do this. It's not an especially difficult task broadly speaking, but it's going to be challenging if it's the first time you've done something like this.

(Also, changing all of your files from .html to .php is the least of your concerns. If that's what it takes, then just do it. But you can actually get around that if you really need to, by telling your server, probably via .htaccess, to treat .html as PHP code-- not my recommendation but possible. Ask if you need more information on that.)

**bernie1227** · 09-24-2012, 09:04 PM

this is a good tutorial on reading files with php. I agree with Daniel, it is very worthwhile learning some sort of server-side scripting language.

**wrathyimp** · 09-25-2012, 07:08 AM

Thanks Daniel, Can give nore info on the ajax you have mentioned.
Bernie, i will try the tutorial.

**bernie1227** · 09-25-2012, 08:15 AM

personally, I'd go for a server-side language such as ASP, PHP or Python rather than just Ajax, as when it comes to databases and other components of server-side computing, you would probably want to learn some of these in order to do all of that.

**jscheuer1** · 09-25-2012, 09:23 AM

I'm still a little unclear what the three pages are. How is Our News Page different from the News Page itself. If all of each story is to be on one of those pages and only snippets on the others, I think that the biggest challenge would be creating the snippets and linking them each to their respective full story counterparts.

An XML file like is used in an RSS feed might be good.