client updates

[pilki]

hi people new to the forums and would appreciate some advice.

im making a free site for a mates skate park, probably using dreamweaver and flash. what i want to know is how does my client update the site with news etc without having to have the software used to make it? do i need to update it, or is there a way that once its up and running they can update some content themselves.

hope some one can help me out with some advice.

thanks

[Nightfire]

I've heard that php can work well with flash, but never (not that i've oticed) seen how well they work together.

Apart from php and flash, all I can think of it doing t yourself

[pardicity3]

You could always make a little control panel thingy in php that allows the client to input certain things into a database. Then pull that info from the database and insert it into the page. Of course that isn't exactly the smallest task, and if php isn't your cup of tea, it may seem quite daunting.

So, if that option fails I suppose you could always do the excessive commenting route :D. Just comment your code enough to make it decipherable and maybe you could give your client a quick course on where to type and what not to mess with! (A highly unlikely possibility, but still....).

[pilki]

php, yeah right

thanks guys, had a thought(rare) can i have certain 'text fields' such as news, etc, in dreamweaver linked to a seperate text file. so that all the client would have to do is update the text file and upload it to the server with the right file name etc, and DW would load this info into the right place.??? or should i just go back to bed

[brothercake]

I think that's a fine solution - make sure that if the text file has to be in a specific format, you have some kind of check or validation in place; at the very least, provide good documentation :)

[pilki]

thanks, ill try that for myself see if i can get it to work, but in the meantime if anyone drops bye and knows of a good tutorial or something that might help please post it.

cheers all

[pardicity3]

Well, if I am reading your post right, you will need to use somthing like Server Side Includes (good info can be found here: http://www.bignosedbird.com/) or PHP (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.include.php) to include those text files into the page. It isn't very hard at all and might prove to be a good solution.

[pilki]

thanks, but i think that using php and such is over complicating the situation. ive experimented with having an inserted html file into the news area src="news.htm" which can be edited by the 'client' in word or similar, as long as it produces a html file, save it as news.htm in the site folder and the main page searches for that source and displays it in the correct place in the page. so this leaves the client free to edit certain parts of the site news etc without depending on me.

obviously im not a veteran in coding and stuff, but is this a good way of producing the results i want??
to make sure the new text is consistent in style each time the client updates, would i use css or is there a better way?