pcs800

I have edited xml documents before but I'm not completely comfortable with it. It seems like there has got to be a simple php code which would look at a document at a defined path, pull data from between tags. I saw it before but cannot seem to find it again.

Well I do have mysql 5 installed and it is being used by a couple php apps, but I did not write them so i have no idea how to create a script which looks at the database for it's info. Nor do I have a clue how to add the data to mysql. I do have admin rights on the DB but again I don;t know how to manually manipulate it.

You are not understanding my concept here. All of the edited page would show on the private output, all but some of the edited page would show on the public output, so editing one document would apply to two pages.

That all sounds great but I am trying to avoid using a database since I am quite illiterate with them. I had found a php code snippet elsewhere on the net that talked about doing basically what i have explained above, using just a text file of any type, most likely an include file.

Where in this code am i telling it where to get the data? shouldn't there be a path to the file I am editing? And if there is an easier way that you guys know of, feel free to enlighten me. But logical to me is if I am going to edit two external files, then why even use them? Why not just edit a plain html page for public and one for private?

MathewJ, your solution would have me editing two files all the time, that is precisely what i am trying to avoid. Richard, sort of..... My company needs to post a directory of all department heads, but we don't want the public seeing their email address or phone numbers, etc. So I would like to edit one include file which has name, dept, title, phone, email, etc. And use the include file in a public page and private page, but use a php script to restrict the data on the public one. Like this. <---startpub--->html code including all data like name department address<---endpub--->Phone number email are outside the tags and therefore not included on the public page.

I am familiar with using include files to populate a php page but what I need to do now is this: I have two pages, one is public and one is private. Both pages will reside on the same web server but one is accessible only by staff and the pother is public. Both will have the exact same data except the public one should not include some of the data. I thought maybe there was a way to use php to grab content from an external file between a couple of tags. Like only get the data between <---publicStart---><---publicEnd---> Is this possible and how would I do it?