Growing Pains

[jbroder]

I have been posting content from users on
my site. It is getting to be time consuming to post them manually. Please help. Sorry
about the long post. It is about my site
http://www.guitartricks.com

USER SUBMITTED PAGES
Currently they send me a form thru formmail. I modified formmail to add the proper HTML tags. I paste their email into a file, spell check it, and upload it. All these files go into a folder, about 10 files weekly, that I index with a search engine script. There are currently about 200 files in that folder.

USER FOLDERS
If the user's postings are good, I give them their own folder. I do a main page for each user's folder by hand. I post all their submissions and the associated sound files in that folder.

I want to add a geocities-type feature to automate the process. I can't keep up with the volume already and I expect it to get bigger. I need file upload (wav and gif),
automatic links within a user folder from
index.html to all the files, spell ck if I can get it, and a vacation.

Can I get there with mySQL and PHP or am I better off buying one of the packages for sale $300ish at cgi-resource? I have a little perl skill and I just took a SQL class.




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guitartricks.com

[Del]

Hi there

Well, for the 'User Submitted Pages' part, you may want to look at the 'Modified Homepage Maker' at cgi.notts.net (http://cgi.notts.net) .

As for the 'User Folders', please consider JanetPro downinit.com/scripts/janetpro/ (http://downinit.com/scripts/janetpro/) . Sorry, shameless self plug.

Del

[Justin]

Hm, well, as far as user submitted pages, are these actual html files? Or more like articles? Here's what I'd do (my lazy side showing):

Get a guestbook or bulletin board script (even a UBB - has it's own search engine http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif) - and just modify it a little bit to look the way you need it to look.

Now if you're talking full html pages, I know there are some free scripts out there but naturally you get what you pay for... so they are probably pretty cheesy http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif Might could find one that's relatively inexpensive that will do the job though...

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[jbroder]

Justin,
They are full html pages. I would prefer
to keep it that way, otherwide bulletin board is a natural.

To write full files, I figure I could just modify formmail to write to $timestamp.html or something. My question then, is "how many files can I put in a folder and search with
a perl script before performance becomes a real problem?" Do I need to go to mySQL?

Thanks for your help. And Del, thanks for the
plug. I'll check it out.

Jon

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guitartricks.com