connecting a database to a website

smanhead1

Could someone please tell me an easy way of connecting a simple database to a website. (I am a new at websites)

Thanks in advance

[Deleted User]

You'll need some kind of database server and a scripting language

Flexible_Friend

For example PHP and a MySQL database

nickmack

If it's very simple and for small scale use, you can just use an Access database to store the information and connect to that.

Just put the Access database file on the web server and connect to it in your scripting language.

Blacksheep1979

have a look at ruby on rails - there are some very easy guides on how to get websites up and running with rails as it maps all the ddatabases for you automatically.

thor

Can someone explain what connecting database to a webserver allows you to do? Is it a way os allowing acces to a large amount of data via the internet? If so are there any simple examples?

Blacksheep1979

amazon, any online e-comerce, friends reunited etc.

ITs a way to store and organise data so you can find and collate the data easily.

jamalfatty

Download the free trial of dreamweaver from the Macromedia/Adobe site and have a quick look through the included help, makes it very easy to create dynamic database-driven sites.
You may want to pick up a cheap book on either ASP or PHP as well, this will help enormously.

sweven

Thor - connecting a database to a website allows you to make it 'dynamic'. What this means is that the website can show different information to different people depending upon a variety of criteria.

For instance, I run a website for an estate agency - users can search for property by location, price etc. The results page then draws the information from the database and creates the HTML to send to the user showing the properties they are interested in.

Alternatively, the site might check a cookie on the user's machine to see when they last visited, and then show them only new properties since then.

smanhead1 - can you tell us more about your web hosting - is it on a Windows server or Linux?

smanhead1

I am not sure. my host is heartinternet. Please check them out at http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/home-h.shtml

sweven

Looks like a Linux server so you would use PHP as your scripting language and MySQL databases to connect to.

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql is one of a number of tutorials you could use to learn how to do this.