OT - Form output in web design

[loozrrtuba]

I have a quick question for all of you web savvy people...

 

I am building a website and wish to have a page for indivisuals comments, most specifically about a picture. This is for a funny "place the caption" type page, but the concept would also be used for a guestbook type area, or leaving general bulletin board type messages...

 

Here's what I would like to do:

 

Have a pic at the top of the page with a simple form below it for the caption text and the name of the person subitting. Upon clicking SUBMIT, the page would refresh itself, and the caption would appear below the form in a table or BBS fashion, but at the bottom of everyone elses submissions. kinda like:

 

PIC

Form

(dotted line or page break type)

Submission 1

Submission 2

Sub 3

Etc

 

The page would grow in length as the submission keep coming in.

 

 

what sorts of terms should I google? Where do I start? What programming or design language will I need?

 

 

I have Dreamweaver 8 and a decent handle on most of the essential functions.

 

 

Thanks guys and gals

 

Justin

[zeronyne]

SQL

Forms

PHP

 

There are tons of prefab scripts for this kind of thing.

[Phait]

Maybe peruse http://www.hotscripts.com

 

I'm not sure if a javascript version would exist, you could just drop that right in. But the way I'd do it is use PHP and that's more than enough for an inexperienced user to get up and running with.

[deanmass]

http://www.phpbb.com/

 

I have used this as a user, but don't know how to integrate it into a web server, but, I see this one all over, and it seems fast and flexible.

[blue2blue]

Problem is, you can't do it with just a simple html page. You need something on the backend to update your caption list.

 

Happily, though, for this, you don't need a (SQL) database -- or even XML (which can be used to store structured data). Though a database backend would give you all kinds of flexibility like the ability to update/delete/etc messages, sort, etc. But, really, for what you want to do it's really overkill.

 

All you need is for your PHP or ASP script to accept the output of the form and write that to the file as a simple server-side file append.

 

I'm a little rusty on the PHP front, but it would be easy with ASP to append to a simple text file on the server and then do an "include" of that in your display page. (You could presumably just write to the display page but that would be a bit trickier to little advantage I can think of off the top of my head.)

 

 

To edit the captions/comments you could just log in via FTP (with DW or whatever) and edit the comments file with a text editor and then re-upload.

 

 

Not all hosts/servers support ASP or PHP, though, some one, some the other, some both. Some neither.

 

One "nice" thing about ASP scripting is that you can use either jscript or vbscript. A lot of folks like PHP, though. Myself, it's hard on my eyes. But that's no big deal...