Question

I’m an iPhone developer who’s new to web development. I’m experienced HTML and CSS, but I’m new to PHP, and installed MAMP on my mac.

I’m writing a website for someone who needs a basic CMS (I think that’s the right term!). Basic info that they will need to edit such as home page text, about section, etc. I have set up as php includes on txt files. Like this (on the home page):

<?php include 'homeText.txt' ?>

I’ve also setup an admin.php page where admins can login to edit the site’s content. (When I say login I mean if (username == x && password == x) with hardcoded values).

In this page I’d like to have a drop-down, allowing the user to select a text file to open, and when they choose one, it opens up in a rich text editor. (Any formatting would be HTML, which the rich editor would parse, to show formatted text).

Does anyone know of a suitable, open-source rich HTML editor that I could easily embed into a PHP page, and send the resulting HTML off on a PHP post to write to the file?

Thanks in advance – sorry for asking such a beginner question!

Answer 1

you are doing it wrong way, i highly doubt that you can develop the application so sooner, as you said you only started learning PHP from yesterday, your examples shows that you are very poor in understating the basics of server side language, you said you would check the login with if (username == x && password == x) this is totally wrong way of doing it, instead you should use database like MySQL to store and check the login credentials i.e via $_SESSION (Session Variable), to be more precise,

Consider a Login Form

<form action="checkLogin.php" method="post">
    <input type = "text" name="username"/>
    <input type = "password" name = "password"/>
    <input type = "submit" name = "submit" value ="login"/>
</form>

It is always better to have database, consider the following database with the following tables and values.

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `password` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
);
INSERT INTO `users` VALUES('First User', '6c049bc0f30da673d0a82c5bd1a13cde');
INSERT INTO `users` VALUES('Second User', '6a6150f8eb2c263a31eb91487bebf1d6');
INSERT INTO `users` VALUES('Third User', '2fd7e7348da8dd5f67103b15be525859');

the second argument is hashed values of your password, i have used md5(), you can use sha1() or others too.

Now to check the login credentials you need to write the following code in your checkLogin.php

<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
    $username = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['username']);
    $password = sha1(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['password']));
    $result = mysql_query('SELECT id, username FROM users WHERE users.username = '.$username.' AND users.username =.'$password) or die('unable to select database');
    if(mysql_num_rows($sesult) > 0) {
        $row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
        $_SESSION['userId'] = $row['userId'];
    }   
}
?>

in other pages if you want to check if the user is logged so that you can give him access, then you simply need to check Session Variables

if(isset($_SESSION['userId'])) {
    //Give Page Access to this user.
}

This is just a basic and rough idea about how PHP works, to get you started i would recommend you check out this tutorial for Novice.
http://devzone.zend.com/article/627