Question

So I’ve undertaken a project that’s a little more complex than was initially stated to me.

My big issue is I’m not sure of an easy way to do the following:

this site is intended to have tons of traffic. There will be a page domain.com/signup or potentially 50 pages domain.com/STATE/signup

Each page will be the same, except it will iframe a different website for each person. so externalsite.com/thepersonspage based on the name (and maybe city/state) of the person.

I could, in theory, just create pages with different iframes in them every single time a new member comes on board (we are expecting 500-1000 in the first month of launch.

Would it be better (or easier/more effecient) way of doing that? Perhaps something like a state drop-down, that then shows all the people tagged for that state and dynamically generating that via php?

If we get 20,000 people on this, I need the easiest way to manage that as possible. Separate pages seems a little overkill, since the page is entirely same, but the iframed page is different (so that particular user gets credit for people they sign up).

Or is there a simple way to maybe query-string or $_POST it from a simple form, including City, State, First and Last name?

Unfortunately, I don’t know the format of the externalsite.com/notsureofthisformat so I can’t really tie it to that.

I know this is a pretty specifically broad question, but I’m just looking for a ‘general direction’ to ease management of 10,000+ members.

Answer 1

Never ever generate pages on per user basis. What happens if you have a million users registered? a million files in a directory? no file system will handle that gracefully. Just don’t do it.

Have a database table (could be a flat file if you like) that will store Iframe url for every user. And one landing page that will look-up the table, matching user to their iframe url. And just print that url in iframe src attribute.
Something like that (I have not done php for a while now and don’t have it set up anywhere, so I’ll just do pseudo-code)

// username to be replaced by a parameter
$query = "select url from table where user = 'username'";

//run query against the database
$url = $query[url];
echo "<iframe src='".$url."' />";