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confused, but eager!

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confused, but eager!
I just recently found dbman and am intrigued as to how I can integrate it into a site I am building for a client.

What I'd like to do is to use it as a back end for adding articles to a site. In reality, it is a small site. We will start out with 3-5 articles, and hopefully add 2-4 articles a month.

What I'd like to do is create a form that my client would use to "add" an article to the db. There he can fill out the information of: Author, Volume number, photo upload, etc. The text could get kinds longish (magazine article length). I would expect the public to not have access to adding to the db, just viewing, searching etc.

IS DBman a good tool to use for this? DBmanMYSQL is out of the question, btw (budget)

If so, could someone stear me in the right direction for making this happen? I am new to databases and dbman. :) Thanks.

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Re: confused, but eager! In reply to
In Reply To:
IS DBman a good tool to use for this?
Yes...and since your database will be relatively small due to infrequent postings, then you don't really need the DBMAN SQL version.

In Reply To:
If so, could someone stear me in the right direction for making this happen?
As a starting point to see what DBMAN can do...refer to the NewsMan mod listed in the DBMAN -> Modifications section of the Resources section.

Regards,

Eliot Lee
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Re: confused, but eager! In reply to
Thanks AnthroRules,

I am wondering... how many articles can it handle? I have read that db's larger than 1 mb it tends to choke. Also, If we have images in our articles...wouldn't that make the database choke with 2 dozen images & articles?

And is ther any way of doing this (using dbman as an article back-end) without adding a hack?

Anyone have a site that you use dbman like this?

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Re: confused, but eager! In reply to
The images are separate and stored elsewhere in your server...not really part of "data" only referencing images that you want to include...so, NO, it will not negatively affect your database size.

In terms of the number of articles, you have to do your own calculations...for example, I have archived newsletter issues stored in a "database" (actually MySQL), but the size of 32 "articles/newsletters" is about 400,000 bytes right now...I have six text fields, which contain on average about 15,000 bytes...some newsletters have more, some have less.

So, do some calculations...how large are the current articles? How many articles do you anticipate over, let's say, the next two years? Multiple the number of articles times the amount of text in each article.

In Reply To:
And is ther any way of doing this (using dbman as an article back-end) without adding a hack?
Well, you will have to configure the default.cfg (cfg stands for configuration) file to use your own fields that you want to add...and to add a unique image for each article, the best thing to do is employ the FILE UPLOAD MOD...So, NO, you will not be able to use DBMAN for your project out-of-box, you will need to hack it.

In Reply To:
Anyone have a site that you use dbman like this?
Look at the Sites in Action section in the Resources section..and look at the NewsMan's web site...I believe they have a demo of the code hack or have it working in their site.



Regards,

Eliot Lee