Simple News section - do I need to learn PHP/ mSQL?

Call Me Jimmy

So I'm building a website and there is to be a very simple news section, updated every couple of weeks, not day-to-day.

I was wondering, in the interest of cutting down development time/cost is there an easy option for adding such a thing? There would be a preview of the news which shows the latest 3 items, requiring you to click stuff like 'read more' or 'all news' to get to the meat and bones of it.

I am very inexperienced in web development and just need to know do I need to have a database for it or can I get away with something else?

I'd really appreciate any feedback, sorry if I haven't explained myself well.

jingx3

I would use Wordpress
content management system.
Needs MySQL.

Call Me Jimmy

Thanks for that, but when you say needs mSQL, you mean the host has to support it/have it installed?

From the examples I've seen, I will have to know some PHP and it seems wordpress is a whole page in and of itself, i.e. I haven't seen it being used in a small corner of a website say for headlines; it is possible though?

ron_darrell

To be honest, if you don't want to use a CMS such as wordpress then yes you will need to learn a scripting language of some sort. PHP and MySQL would probably be one of the easier combinations, others might be ASP and MS-Access or .Net & SQL Server.

A simple blog/forum would be one of the simpler projects you might try when learning a scripting language to interact with a DBMS and there should be hundreds of tutorials on the net explaining how to implement this.

Alternatively, you could implement a CMS (most hosting packages come with some sort of CMS pre-installed be it Wordpress, Joomla or some other variation) and just type into a input page the data you wish to add.

Check with your web hosting company and see what scripting languages the package you've bought supports, likewise what DBMS and finally do they have a CMS preinstalled for you.

Best of luck
RD

pauldiv

You mentioned that you are building a web site but never actually said whether the site was already up and running or if you are starting completely from scratch. This is important.

If you can be clearer on this point then it would mean people would be more able to help you out. How much news is the site going to contain?

If starting from scratch then look at wordpress because it already has the facility for taking the first paragraph or two from all your articles and printing them out as a list with the 'read more' links. Wordpress is quite easy to learn in a weekend and might be ideal for your situation. If you have a hosting account then look in your control panel and see what applications they have given you. Lots of hosting providers give you Wordpress or similar site building software.

If the site is already running and contains articles then there are php functions that can read the first paragraph from each article and display them in the same way that wordpress does.

You dont have to learn php to do this but only how to use a couple of the file reading functions. Good luck.

Call Me Jimmy

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I'm starting the site from scratch if that helps. Does wordpress not sort of limit the content of the site and how it's laid out. From what I've seen I'd have to work with templates etc?

daymobrew

Call Me Jimmy wrote: »

Does wordpress not sort of limit the content of the site and how it's laid out. From what I've seen I'd have to work with templates etc?

You can use "pages" (as different from "posts"). Pages have content that rarely changes.

So, you could have pages for most of your content and one section for the news.

Changing the look of Wordpress is more complicated than for regular HTML pages but there is plenty of help out there.