Accessibility

Contribute Article

 

Maintaining Database Content with PHP (or ColdFusion), Contribute 3, and Dreamweaver MX 2004


Jesse Rodgers

Jesse Rodgers

University of Waterloo

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Part 1: About the Application
  3. Part 2: Dissecting a Simple Application to Check Things Out and Put Them Back in a Database
Created:
31 May 2005
User Level:
Intermediate

Macromedia Contribute 3 along with Contribute Publishing Services (CPS) are starting to prove to be a very useful pair of applications. The Contribute workflow is simple: You browse to the web page you want to edit, edit the web page, and then publish it. CPS compliments your workflow with some features that you would expect to only find with a content management system—user management, logging of changes, etc. But one of its limitations is with web sites that have content in a database.

In this article, I will go over the theory behind an application I, along with three other co-op students since the fall—Anton Polski, Lori Superina, and Areeb Shams—developed to facilitate a publication process in publishing to a database. It also allow to manage the content by checking it out of the database, creating a static version, and dropping the static version into a "static" directory so you can edit it with Contribute.

Part two of this article offers you a relatively simple collection of PHP functions, put together by Areeb Shams, that can use to check data out, generate a list of articles, and publish to the database. I will also discuss how to expand the application.

Aaron Neff of iTiSdESign has translated the code into ColdFusion. The concepts and principles in this article also apply to the ColdFusion version. Both the PHP files and the ColdFusion files are in the sample files dowload linked below.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Macromedia Contribute 3

Dreamweaver MX 2004

Tutorials and sample files:

Prerequisite knowledge:

Familiarity with Dreamweaver, Contribute, PHP, and MySQL.

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About the author

Jesse Rodgers is Manager of Web Communications at the University of Waterloo. His main responsibilities are developing more effective ways for the university to communicate with its various audiences on the web. He actively promotes the practice of accessible design and web standards to the campus web development community. Jesse is part of the Web Standards Project's Dreamweaver Task Force. He also maintains a web developers blog and enjoys Jujubes.