itsinmyhead Posted July 18, 2008 Share Posted July 18, 2008 I work for a local newspaper, and our biggest feature is our classified ads. We use Filemaker to input all of the ads into our system, and they are able to be exported as an HTML table. I'm looking for a way to turn this data into a classified ad database viewable online, preferably searchable. I've looked around and a bunch of PHP, MySQL and XML variants on classified ad setups. All of them seem to require the ads to be input one by one, though, which would take a huge amount of time. I'm looking for a way that I can take our classified data in an XML file and call all of the information from that. I'm looking to be able to sort by category, as well as to search (which isn't necessary immediately, but would be nice at some point). As I said, I have spent some time looking around, but I haven't found anything that really fits what I'm looking for. I'm not advanced in any sort of PHP or MySQL - though I am quick to learn. As such, I'm not really sure what type of scripting would be best, and I also have no preference. Any help that you may have would be monumental. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ag3nt42 Posted July 18, 2008 Share Posted July 18, 2008 well SQL databases and php are capable of handling quite big load of data.. granted I don't know the full situation but if I were to attempt such a think I would load everything up into the SQL database. and use php for searches and listings I have a webapp right now that uses php and sql to compeletly build an entire scheduling system. I would consider this a small-med webapp and it already handles about 10-25 querys per task. thats quite a bit of information hell a better example is this very forum.. if this forum can handle this many ppl plus posting and retrieving all these posts.. i'm sure it can hanlde a few classified ads Matter of fact I used to work at a newspaper relatively big one.. and we used a php webapplication for the entire website.. to post stories and ads and what not.. that site generated about 700k hits month ps to make things easier you could build a small app to fill your database for you. and use the XML files to pull the info in and submit to the database. essentially using php to read the XML and distrubute its values across query's to be submitted to the database. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itsinmyhead Posted July 18, 2008 Author Share Posted July 18, 2008 Thanks for the quick reply! Like I said, I'm pretty much new to using PHP and whatnot. Could you give me a good starting point for accomplishing what I'm looking for? I've looked around at tutorials & sites on beginning PHP, but I'd also like a couple of more specific resources. I'm just having a hard time finding too much - I feel like I'm looking for a very particular thing, and I'm not sure what other general ideas may help explain/teach to me what I need. Thanks so much! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itsinmyhead Posted July 23, 2008 Author Share Posted July 23, 2008 Just giving this a bump to see if anyone has any further advice. We use FileMaker Pro here to input our classifieds, and it apparently has some SQL interaction available. Again, I'm not too sure what can be done with it. I've been reading up on SQL databases and things of that nature, but I'm still not sure where I should begin, or even how to. As I stated, I'm new to this area of things, so any help on where I should start would be great. Thanks for the help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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