Submission form that will insert content on another page - php

Question

Me and My friends are starting a website. I'm the only one who knows any type of coding. Since they don't know any programming language I'd like to make a form submission page that will allow them to just type in basic info, updates and have it generate and insert PHP or HTML into the main content page for them.
For example if name in box 1="Rob" I want it to insert <p>Rob #HH:MM MM:DD:YY</p>
And whatever info is typed into box 2 to be in the following paragraph.
I know something like above is possible with PHP and SQL, but I'm just kinda stumped as to know what it needs to be searched to learn it.
Thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

It sounds as though you don't necessarily even need any PHP for this. This is something you could just as easily do in the client itself. Of course, for something more elaborate, you're going to need to build this out more and can undoubtedly make use of a more elaborate system, but for your example, just piece together what you're aiming to join with some JavaScript.
I've assembled a sample at http://codepen.io/anon/pen/VjdPgm but here's the important bit:
HTML
<p>Box 1</p>
<input id="box1">
<p>Box 2</p>
<input id="box2">
<br/>
<button onclick="generate()">Generate</button>
<p>Result</p>
<textarea id="result" cols="100" rows="10"></textarea>
JavaScript
var generate = function() {
var output = "";
//Append the text for box1
var box1 = document.querySelector('#box1').value;
output = '<p>' + box1 + '#HH:MM MM:DD:YY</p>';
//Append the text for box2
var box2 = document.querySelector('#box2').value;
output += '<p>' + box2 + '#HH:MM MM:DD:YY</p>';
//Set the output in the result box
document.querySelector('#result').value = output;
}
You click on the button, it executes this JavaScript function that pulls the values from the boxes you filled in and drops the values into the inline templates.
Now, if you actually want this to save the logic somewhere, you're going to need to incorporate the logic to save this via PHP and potentially store somewhere with the rest of your templates or the like. For this, you'll need to consider a number of other aspects including validation, escaping and how you're designing your own pages to build them with their content (e.g. does this script overwrite an existing file or do you assemble the webpage based on some MySQL lookups), but this is a bit outside the scope of your question.
If you're utilizing a CMS of sorts, you might consider using something like the above example to generate the markup so they can just drop what they want in the CMS and avoid having to write all that other stuff yourself.