Hi Justin--
I've been wrestling with a similar problem.
You say:
I'm considering:
a) storing this data in a MySQL table (a fairly simple
query) b) storing this data in a pseudo XML format like:
id24/id
authorJustin French/author
author_email[EMAIL PROTECTED]/author_email
date_published2003-11-28/date_published
introThis is my intro/intro
bodyThis is my text and html -- say 1000 words?/body
Um, the above isn't pseudo XML. It's actually perfectly
fine XML. Nothing pseudo about it.
I'd love to
hear any opinions about which would form of data
retrieval would cause less of a performance burden on the
server. . .
I've been wrestling with the same (or very similar)
question: I'm trying to devise a flexible templating system
where I can give my users control over content and inline
formatting (allowing them to use, for example, p, em,
span, ul) but retain control over page layout myself.
It does seem to me that XML should play a role here, but I
haven't been able to find the right XML tools.
Ideally, the content would be stored in an XML document as
you described. Your PHP page would use XPATH to address
elements (or nodes) of the XML to set the value of PHP
variables which would then be plugged into the HTML page.
XPATH allows you to do that much.
But every implementation of XPATH I've seen returns only
the CDATA of an XML node, i.e. it strips out all the tags
contained in the node. Thus you can't imbed formatting tags
in the content.
(I've been tempted to go ahead and do a quick and dirty
system using a relational DB, but such a system would break
down from complexity over time. You would need a new table
for each set of page components [or else devise a very
messy and unnormal system with one grand table of columns
with multiple uses].)
Am I missing something? Is there an implementation of xpath
that does return the full contents of a node and not just
the CDATA?
I guess you could use regular top-level PHP to parse an XML
document chracter by character, storing in an array
pointers to the beginning and ending characters of each
element (i.e. the first character following the start tag
and the last character before the end tag). Then you could
look up in the array each desired element and use substr()
to read its value and set a PHP variable to it.
Ideally, you would want a system that included a facility
to edit the XML document as well as read it. This would be
used in the user's interface for editing his content. I
would think an easy first step would be to recreate (or
reassemble) the XML document after each edit session.
--John
On Friday 13 June 2003 11:30 pm, Justin French wrote:
Hi all,
I'm looking at a site where there will be a lot of
articles, all of which will be added once, and rarely
edited again...
Let's say each article consisted of 6 data types:
- id
- author
- authorEmail
- datePublished
- introduction
- bodyText
I'm considering:
a) storing this data in a MySQL table (a fairly simple
query) b) storing this data in a pseudo XML format like:
id24/id
authorJustin French/author
author_email[EMAIL PROTECTED]/author_email
date_published2003-11-28/date_published
introThis is my intro/intro
bodyThis is my text and html -- say 1000 words?/body
I plan on doing my own performance tests, but I'd love to
hear any opinions about which would form of data
retrieval would cause less of a performance burden on the
server (MySQL is on the same box as the htdocs and
apache).
TIA,
Justin
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