[Seeking advice on technology to use]

Thanks @PFMaBiSmAd. I'll forget about XML for now

[Seeking advice on technology to use]

@freelance84 @thehippy: Thank you very much for your replies, much appreciated. Looking into MySQL and Workbench now

[Seeking advice on technology to use]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm looking for some advice on sorting and presenting data in a simple php website. I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

 

Site background:

• An activity holiday website
  
• About 100 holidays in different countries and different categories
  
• Site uses php includes
  
• Each holiday on a single page at a unique url
  
• All handcoded
  
• All developed locally and uploaded through FTP, no CMS, no database
  
• The site receives low amounts of traffic and is on a shared server
  

 

A simple setup, but for me very effective so far.

 

What I'd like to do:

Create a page where visitors can make a selection of holidays based on things like country, type, duration and price. I'm imagining visitors selecting a number of criteria, pressing a button and receiving a list of pages on the site that match their criteria.

 

You may now be thinking, that's a piece of cake, why are you asking here?

 

My current skills

HTML, CSS and some PHP. I'm also comfortable with Excel 

Obviously I need to learn something new. The question is which technology?

 

What would you recommend I learn in my scenario? What do you think would be the simplest way of doing what I want?

 

At the moment I'm thinking along the lines of:

• An XML file with the criteria for each holiday in it and access this through PHP (not sure if this is do-able/sensible), but I think I would like simplicity of it;
  
• A mySQL database (big learning curve for me I think, but will do it if it's the best route);
  
• An SQLite database (maybe more suitable for my needs than mySQL);
  
• Something else?
  

 

Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

Thank you

 

Dave