Micheal, I forwarded this to the list for further discussions.
I also assumed you were on the list already since you originally followed
up to this thread from the list.
Everyone, meet Michael. He's got some good ideas below. Lars, what ideas
or restrictions were you thinking of in terms of databases? Did you want
lots of little files? I'm not familiar with database implementations but
Michael is suggestion PostgreSQL or MySQL below...
CSS is what we've discussed moving to a number of times but no-one has had
the time or experience to do this (till now :-)
Allan. (ARRae)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 21:21:15 +1200
From: Michael Koziarski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Allan Rae <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: GIFs
> Well... you just volunteered remember...
> The biggest task we have at the moment is to ensure that we produce valid
> html-4.01final pages (most pages are currently invalid transitional 4.0 --
> I'm also checking accessibility using www.cast.org/bobby/). It'd be nice
> to make use of CSS instead of the explicit stuff we do now.
I'd like to generate XHTML/1.0 and use CSS for the design. I'm a bit
of an extremist on the CSS vs HTML for design. Ideally I'd have all
but the trickiest design work done with CSS (due to Netscape 4.x's
horribly broken CSS engine this could be risky).
> That is a major overhaul job. There are several interim things that I'd
> like to get done for LDN in particular:
> automatically generated pages for:
> news/archive.php3 (build a list in date order of issues)
> news/all-tips.php3
> news.php3
>
> What we really need is a proper database or something to hold all the
> short news items for news.php3 that are currently just built in one big
> file: news.inc. That would allow us to show 10 items at a time for
> example.
My experience is that the week or two's extra effort you put into
getting a Database Schema right is worth it in the long run. Having
all the news etc. stored in a database makes content redesign REALLY
trivial.
I'd love to show you an example of a site I've programmed but they
just aren't public. Most of my work was intranet related or the
Website is now closed (www.hardcoregamers.com) or reimplemented
(www.compudigm.com).
Essentially being able to add news through a web interface is
extremely beneficial (delegate news additions etc.) and cleaner (no
need for hundreds of flat files, just one big SQL database).
> I'd also like to remodel/redesign the menus -- mostly just names of menus
> but possibly also how they are drawn.
I'm no designer. I'll pass on questions like that.
I'd like to have a PostgreSQL (or MySQL if you'd prefer) / PHP 4
website up and running soonish. I'll build a prototype Database
driven site at http://www.koziarski.org/LyX/ over the next few days.
I'll e-mail you when it's done.
--
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| Michael Koziarski |"Conventional wisdom is often |
| BCA/BSc Student, OpenBSD/Linux user | long on convention and short |
| & Objectivist. | on wisdom" -- |
| http://www.koziarski.com | Warren E. Buffett, BRK.A |
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