Organizing articles

[SolitarySoul]

I've done several searches but couldn't quite find what I'm looking for, so if anyone could help with this I'd appreciate it.

 

I have a website where I usually upload 10+ new articles a week.  I'm a n00b with PHP so right now I've been uploading them each as individual html files and then manually add links on my homepage and a couple 'archive' pages (Which are nothing more currently than a list of the articles by date which I add and link to manually each time I upload a new article) on my website to the articles.  I've created a very basic database for starters, with id, title, content and created (date) fields.  Now there's several things I'm wanting to do in addition to having this archive page automatically list and link to each article I upload:

 

1.  At the bottom of each article, I'd like to have a section where 5 other "Related Articles" links will be listed.  I thought maybe I could do this somehow by using keywords in the meta tags or something, but I'm not sure how.

 

2.  On the homepage I'd like to have a similar section which lists the 5 or 10 most recently added articles, similar to the "What's New?" section on the homepage of phpfreaks (but without the comments).

 

3.  And finally, for now at least , I'd like to have another section on my homepage for "Most Popular", listing the 5 or 10 most viewed articles on my site.  I'd also like to be able to include "Hits: (#)" at the end of the links to show how many views they have had.

 

Thanks a bunch!

[craygo]

Do you want to continue to use separate html pages for the articles, or do you want to use the database as your back end for all articles?

 

What you want can be accomplished relatively easy by using the database as your backend and letting mysql do all the work for you. You could actually keep the html code in a field inside the mysql database and just echo it out.

[SolitarySoul]

I would prefer to just use the database for it all, I'm just not too sure where to go from here to have the articles listed in the different sections and ways that I prefer. 

 

I've installed a few content management systems like mambo to try and look around in it and see if I can figure it out, but I havn't come up with anything yet.  In fact, mambo has exactly what I'm wanting, but I'm stubborn and don't really want to use the whole system with a template lol, I much prefer to figure out how to add just those particular modules to my site, in addition to having the archive page.