Thanks Mark and Sonu... as much as I've learned over the last few months I
think I'm still a little confused about some of this stuff. I appreciate the
Help you've given me :-)
Would any of you know about any tutorials on something like this? books with
tutorials, etc? If I knew what it was called I would google it - I'm just
not sure exactly what it might be called lol
Thanks again fellas :-D
In a message dated 8/1/2005 10:45:14 P.M. Central Standard Time,
mark@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
I have coded this type of website for many years and have run the gamut of
trying different things -- originally, 8 years ago, I used perl with flat
files and physical folders but in the recent past I have used PHP, MySQL and
dynamic folders.
In my opinion the best way to build this site is with dynamic folders via
custom 404 error handling. Here how it works:
You build the pages for things like "contact us" "my store" "my stuff" or
whatever. Then you send someone to the site with an address like:
mydomain.com/joe which doesn't exist. A custom 404 error handler picks up
the error and parses the URL to identify "joe" as a unique ID. The 404
script pulls "joe's" info from a database and populates the pages with his
custom contact info then delivers the page. Joe's ID usually gets stuffed
into a cookie and then when the person comes back to the site at a later
date, they are delivered joe's info.
That's it in a nut shell. Be sure that you deliver 200 headers and not 404
headers when delivering the dynamic folder.
Now you can do the physical folders and every time someone "signs up" you
can take the template and populate their pages and store these pages in a
real folder named "joe." But, be aware using this method. Success (if
having lots of users is your goal) will be your downfall because this system
is not easily scalable. Just think what happens if you have 500 folders, or
5,000 or 50,000 folders with every folder having a copy of the files in
them.
Here is a 404 script I use:
<?header("HTTP/1.0 200 OK");
require('/home/pathToLookUp/getinfo.php');
?>
And here is the start of the getinfo.php script:
<?
list($blank, $site, $page) = split("\/", $REDIRECT_URL, 3);
$query = "select * from stores where stores.name = '$site' and stores.active
= 'Y' ";
....
?>
Be sure to code the handling of an actual 404 just in case you don't have a
user named joe or the surfer miss types.
There's a ton of work in getting all of the bases covered - but it's sweet
when it's done and you will know a lot of how a server works.
Hope this helps.
Mark Cain
