Hey everyone I have a question. I know how to make basic news scripts and such, but I don't know how to control a page from an admin panel. How would I make something where I can have 2 radio buttons ("Disabled" "Enabled") and if I click Disabled it will make the page go offline. Also, what would I have to do to make the page have a comment of why it is offline. All help is useful, Thanks!

if ($pagedisabled) {
echo("some message");
} else {
// show page;
}

Originally Posted by chrishirst

if ($pagedisabled) {
echo("some message");
} else {
// show page;
}

I know how to display everything. I just don't know how I would create the admin panel to select whether the page is enabled or disabled and setting up the MySQL table. Also, I would like all my pages to have this feature, so how would I set all of this up where every page pulls different information from the database.

Every page should have an ID. You will take that ID and compare it against the database. Your database will have a column which will tell your script if that page is online or not. I've done plenty of things like this in the past few years.. Here's a small example -

MySQL TABLE - Pages

page_id  page_name show_page reason_offline
1           news         1              
2           forums       0              Because our forums suck

PHP Code:

PAGE BEING DISPLAYED - news.php

$page_id = $_GET['page_id']; // What page is this?
$query = "SELECT * FROM pages WHERE page_id=`$page_id`"; // Grab page DB info
$result = mysql_query($query) or die ('Error in query: ' . mysql_error()); // Grab MySQL result
$row = mysql_fetch_object($result); // Put result into an object
if ($row->show_page == 0)
{
// Page is offline. Let em know..
print "This page is currently offline. Please check back later. Reason: $row->reason_offline";
die; // Kill the page.. Make sure to display the rest of your HTML though.
} 


To explain.. You have 4 columns in the table "pages". The columns identify page_id, name, if it's offline or not, and why it's offline.
Your code on all of your pages grabs that specific pages row in the database based on the page id provided using the get method. You sound new so in case you don't know you pass information via the url (www.something.com/index.php?page_id=1) to your script by using $_get['page_id'].
This is all EXTREMELY basic. If you don't understand what I've said here you really need to hit the books much harder. PHP is easy once you get the hang of it.
Good luck. Let me know if you need more help.

I get what you are saying, I understand the functions. Isn't it possible for users to avoid this though? I have a few questions though. I wanted to avoid having my urls "index.php?=1." Plus, wouldn't it be easy for people to just edit the url to a different page id that is online, therefore allowing them to see the disabled page? Is there a way I can simply just make the php $page_id = 1;.

I am sure that above code would send me errors, but I will find out. Thank you very much for the help though . I am fairly new to php, but I am having a lot of fun learning it, and I am starting to understand a lot more.

sure you could do that. I was thinking you had a more CMS driven website but if you want to keep things as static as possible that's definitely the best way to do it.