Modifying a Web Site on the Fly

[Gregg]

I am interested in developing a web site "template" that can be modified using a web based user interface.

In a password protected area a person could set all the various background colors, titles, headers.

Obviously, those sorts of variables lend themselves to being stored in a database. The administrative interface would allow you to change "background color" or the "Title Text" in the database while the web pages would hit the DB to build the page.

Unlike a typical DB, though, the 30 or so items I would wanna put in there would likely build a table something like this:

name value
bgcolor white
title my web page
border 3
fontcolor blue

I just don't know the most efficent way to store these items and retrieve them. Any ideas. I don't wanna have to build a record set and search through it each time I need a value.

Hints, suggestions, insight?

[jdavison]

is this just something you are doing personally or for a project or company. Cheapest way would be with access and asp. Its pretty easy and there are tons of sites for using asp. Check some of these:

http://168.144.4.35/asp/index.htm ASP Tutorial
http://aspwire.com/ ASPWire
http://www.aspin.com/ ASP Resource
http://www.devguru.com Dev Guru


there are many others too.

Good Luck

the other thing you could do is build an html page with the input you get from your users and then store the whole webpage-html in your database.


is that an idea?

[jdavison]

Yeah but that would be a heck of alot of data to store not to mention he would have to use a memo in access which is terribly ineficient. Its just as easy to write the asp page to take in a few fields and set the page up that way.

[Achichincle]

You could store the information as an ASP include file where your key/value pairs are actually variable assignments...

name="Achichincle"
color="blue"
...

Just by including the ASP file in your template it would automatically declare your variables and you'd just reference then in code as you normally would.

To update the values you'd have to build an ASP page with a routine to write out to a text file (your "settings" page) all the variables and their new values.

If you wanted to display to the user what their current settings are then you just display the name of the variable and it's value on a page.

(in an ASP page)

<p>Name: <%=name%></p>
<p>Color: <%=color%></p>

(although you'd probably want it in a form so they could update the values).

Just an idea.

[jdavison]

Now thats a cool idea, i never thought about that.