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How to Add Image Uploading to Your CMS

31 May 2012 / 93 Comments

17 May 2019: This article and the code were updated for PHP7 compatibility.

In my tutorial Build a CMS in an Afternoon with PHP and MySQL, I showed how to build a simple but useful content management system with PHP and MySQL. I also showed how to extend the CMS to allow article categories.

In this tutorial, you’ll look at another way to extend the CMS. You’ll take the original CMS code, and modify it so that the administrator can upload an image for each article. Then, when a visitor views an article page, the CMS will display the image at the start of the article. In addition, our CMS will generate a smaller thumbnail version of each article image, and display this thumbnail next to each article headline in the homepage and article archive pages.

You can see the finished result by clicking the View Demo link above. Notice the thumbnail images next to each article headline. Click a headline or thumbnail to view the corresponding article, along with the full-size article image.

How to Add Article Categories to Your CMS

25 January 2012 / 68 Comments

View Demo » | Download Code

16 May 2019: This article and the code were updated for PHP7 compatibility.

Since publishing my tutorial Build a CMS in an Afternoon with PHP and MySQL, many readers have asked how to add more features to the CMS. I thought I’d answer some of these questions by writing additional tutorials that build on the original simple CMS.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to add article categories to the CMS. Categories give your site more flexibility: as well as listing all articles on the homepage, you can create separate section pages of your site, with each section page listing the articles belonging to a particular category.

For example, our original CMS demo lumps all types of article — news, reviews, and interviews — together on both the homepage and the archive page. By creating separate News, Reviews, and Interviews article categories in our CMS, we can then create individual archive pages for news, reviews, and interviews in our site.

You can see how this looks by clicking the View Demo link above. Notice that each article title on the homepage has a category name below it (Interviews, Reviews or News). Click a category to view its archive page, which lists all articles in that category, along with the description of the category at the top of the page.

MySQL for Absolute Beginners

25 August 2011 / 62 Comments

A database is an essential part of most websites and blogs, but setting up and using a database can be a daunting task for the beginner web developer.

In this tutorial you’ll learn — in simple terms — how to install, set up, and use a MySQL database on your computer. This will give you a good grounding in MySQL that you’ll find useful when you start developing database-driven websites using PHP, Ruby, or your language of choice.

You’ll explore the following areas in this tutorial:

The concept of a database, and why databases are useful
The advantages of using MySQL to manage your databases
How to install MySQL on your computer
Using the MySQL Monitor program to send commands to your MySQL server
How to create a database and table
SQL (Structured Query Language), and what it’s used for
Adding records to a table, and retrieving records from a table

Ready to start exploring MySQL? Let’s go!

Build a CMS in an Afternoon with PHP and MySQL

21 January 2011 / 624 Comments

View Demo » | Download Code

14 May 2019: This article and the code were updated for PHP7 compatibility.

Building a content management system can seem like a daunting task to the novice PHP developer. However, it needn’t be that difficult. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to build a basic, but fully functional, CMS from scratch in just a few hours. Yes, it can be done!

Along the way, you’ll learn how to create MySQL databases and tables; how to work with PHP objects, constants, includes, sessions, and other features; how to separate business logic from presentation; how to make your PHP code more secure, and much more!

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