I am looking to create a general knowledgeBase for my customer service department which takes information (my thought is from a mysql database) and populates a page with that information based on the content pulled.
Take this site for example:
ToastMaster
I would like to store a primary title, main content, images, etc on my site without actually having to create unique html for each page.
Can anybody make a recommendation for existing suites I could integrate to do so?
Any of a number of content management systems could be easily used for this. Joomla!, Drupal, etc. Try a few out here: http://php.opensourcecms.com/
Related
I am new to Joomla, I am currently trying to set up a information portal for a university which will have information regarding all the faculty members. The information to be displayed would have information like Subjects they teach, total experience, phone number, email id, address, etc etc.
Normal way to deal with this to write a new article about each faculty member.
But I want this to be more dynamic. I dont like the idea to create a new article for each faculty. I am looking for a way that all the information(subjects, email, phone, etc) should be stored in database and while displaying all information should be fetched from the database itself and should be displayed in a preformated way.
Please let me know if anyone is having any idea regarding this..Many Thanks in advance
I'd use a CCK plugin like K2 and add and Extra Field Group, like this ... that way it could be added in the admin. Done what you're doing with many types of content this way.
UPDATE: Just remembered this great little component called joodatabase
You can create a module, or use one from the Joomla extension directory (You're looking for a directory module). A module in Joomla will allow you to access the data stored in the database.
http://extensions.joomla.org/search?q=directory
You can include an external PHP Script in your article and let the php script handle the data based on the query string paramerter(may be like faculty id or something). In order to do that you will need to install a module. http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/edition/custom-code-in-content/60. Using this module you should be able to include a php script within the article.
Old thread but still a hot topic
I think Dynamic Articles with TinyButStrong would solve this problem
https://www.tinybutstrong.com/plugins/joomla/tinybutstrong_help.html
For example adding Tag or Search Parameter into content if no article exist.
Place for much more phantasy
What would be the best way of allowing a news service to be used by many external websites? I want to allow external websites to use some of my functions to display news. What do you suggest?
I would set up RSS feeds for each item you wanted to let people use. Not sure what sort of system you're running, but WordPress allows you to make custom RSS feeds based on almost anything you want; custom post types, categories, etc.
If your news articles are stored in a database table then you can easily extract them using php and populate an rss feed with them.
Then all you do is provide the link to those you wish to use it.
The benefit being it should be straight-forward for them to extract the information they need from it aswell.
An example of how to do this is: http://www.carronmedia.com/create-an-rss-feed-with-php/
Now I have my website built on PHP & Mysql. Consider this like a forum. Now when a user posts a reply in my website 1 (ex. www.website1.com), I want to be able to show the starting thread and it's related replies in a sister website of mine. I want to do this in a way that it does not show the rest of the page & other page contents (like logo etc.). I don't think iframe would be a solution because an iframe would embed the whole page and the users visiting my sister website (totally different domain i.e. www.website2.com) would be able to see all the page contents, like logo etc. I want to avoid that. I want to make them see only limited information from website 1 and only the info. that I intend.
I hope that makes sense. In a way, you could say that I am trying to replicate my 1 website, and show only a limited part of it. Users browsing 2nd website can post a reply in the 2nd website and it should automatically be posted & visible to the visitors of the website 1. Users of website 1 should not know that a user of website 2 has posted it. They would feel that some user from website 1 has posted it. Do I have to use 2 separate mysql DB or just 1? I think it would be problematic if I am trying to use different DB. I also feel I might have to face DB connectivity issues as I can connect to only 1 DB at a time.
It's basically like users of website1.com should feel that they are replying to users of website1.com & users of website2.com should feel that they are replying to users of website2.com. (I need it this way to bridge the gap between them). At the same time I want to make the front end of the websites different so that they don't feel that they are replying to some other users outside the domain. These websites would be under my control and I will have access to the source code at any time. If I need to change the source code, these changes are welcome.
Is this really possible?
Thank you in advance.
I'd recommend generating RSS (might be runtime) and using it on the sister website. If RSS is not suitable for your needs, you can create your own XML-based format (or any other :) )
Make two forums which use one database. Both websites would put new messages in the same database.
Make an API for website1, so that website2 can retrieve and post messages on the forum. Website2 would do a HTTP request to website1, which returns XML or JSON, so that website2 can request a list of posts that it can display.
Have both sites connect to the same database and display the content they pull in whatever way is appropriate for the particular site. Each site can only pull the fields relevant to that site.
If the idea is to have two websites with the same data but different presentations, then you would want to simply share a single database between them - assuming they are hosted in the same place and can both get at the database.
You can then just create different PHP pages that both access the same database in the same way but display the data differently.
The best way to do this would be to have a shared library of functions or classes that both sites use to manipulate the data. You would then build a different "presentation layer" on top of that for each site.
How can I make it so that content from a database is available to search engines, like google, for indexing?
Example:
Table in mysql has a field named 'Headline' which equals 'BMW M3 2005'.
My site name is 'MySite'
User enters 'BMW M3 2005 MySite' in google and the record will show up with results?
Google indexes web pages, so you will need to have a page for each of your records, this doesn't mean to say you need to create 1,000 HTML pages, but following my advice above will dynamically / easily provide a seemingly unique page for each product.
For example:
www.mydomain.com/buy/123/nice-bmw-m3-2005
You can use .htaccess to change this link to:
www.mydomain.com/product.php?id=123
Within this script you can dynamically create each page with up-to-date information by querying your database based on the product id in this case 123.
Your script will provide each record with it's own title ('Nice BMW M3 2005'), a nice friendly URL ('www.mydomain.com/buy/123/nice-bmw-m3-2006') and you can include the correct meta information too, as well as images, reviews etc etc.
Job done, and you don't have to create hundreds of static HTML pages.
For more information on .htaccess, check out this tutorial.
What ILMV is trying to explain is that you have to have HTML pages that Google and other search engines can 'crawl' in order for them to index your content.
Since your information is loading dynamically from a database, you will need to use a server-side language like PHP to dynamically load information from the database and then output that information to an HTML page.
You have any number of options for how to accomplish this specifically, ILMV's suggestion is one of the better ways though.
Basically what you need to do first is figure out how to pull the information from the database and then use PHP (or another server-side language) to output the information to an HTML page.
Then you will need to determine whether you want to use the uglier, default url style for php driven pages:
mysite.com/products.php?id=123
But this url is not very user or search engine friendly and will result in your content not being indexed very well.
Or you can use some sort of URL rewriting mechanism (mod_rewrite in a .htaccess file does this or you can look at more complex PHP oriented solutions like Zend Framework that provide what's called a Front Controller to handle mapping of all requests) to make it so that your url's look like:
mysite.com/products/123/nice-bmw-m3-2006
This is what ILMV is talking about with regard to url masking.
Using this method of dynamically loading content will allow you to develop a single page to load the information for a number of different products based on the Id thus making it seem to the various search engines as though you have a unique page for each product.
Hello I've recently added a weather widget for people to add to their site.
Is basically a php page that people can link to.
My question is can I somehow put a counter or something to count how many people are using my widget?
my widget is located here http://www.site.com/widget/ it's in farsi language.
Well, it depends - do you want to know how many people have used your widget in their web site, or how many people have watched web sites that use your widgets? These numbers are completely different.
For the later option, jonstjohn's method would work great: For easy implementation and lots of features I recommend the Google Analytics way - they have really fancy graphs that show a lot of interesting information.
If on the other hand you want to count how many web sites are using your widget then you can do as follows:
Create a table in your database with a varchar column. Put a unique index on that column.
In your code, read the $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"] parameter to get the URL that called your widget.
Now you want to strip just the domain part from that URL as a web site would probably put your widget in their template so it will be available in all of their pages. So if you want to count web sites and not pages in web sites, then do something like
$domainParts = explode("/", $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]);
$domain = $domainParts[2];
Now insert the domain you found out into your table. If this web site has already called your widget once then the insert would fail with a unique constraint error - just ignore the error (for example by using "#" on your insert command, like #mysql_query("INSERT INTO...") ).
To know how many web sites are using your widget, simply count the number of rows in the table.
You can place tracking code on the PHP page. Possibilities are:
Google analytics code
Record each time the .php page executes by inserting a row in a database
I'm sure there are others, but those should work.