Automatic page creation

I think this may be amore appropriate forum than the other (sorry for posting this twice)

I'm new to PhP and MySQl, and I'd like to know..
Can I have a page in my website that updates every week, but does this automatically as I won't have time to do it myself. I intend to write all versions of this page, a year or twos worth in advance, and store them as records in a database, with paths to the relevant gif files etc, and maybe memo type fields for the text to be displayed. The page will always be of the same format of course.

I'd like to use a Date( ) or Week( ) function or something for this page to once a week look up a random record in this database, and re-write this page based on this information as the one to display for the next week. At the bottom of this page is a link to another page showing all the previous pages, when this page updates at the end of each a url to the existing page is added to the bottom of the previous pages page/menu.

Is this possible, and is it possible in PHP and MySQL?

This page would behave the same for every viewer. Would this page have to be constructed from the database every time it is viewed? I want this to be a paysite too, but this bit will be in the guest/open area, as will a forum (or part of one).

Also, I don't want the database look-up to produce the same example (page/db-record) twice. Should I check against the Previous Pages html page, or add a 'displayed' field to the database as a flag?

I want one page to redisplay this way nightly, and another weekly, as things stand. If this is do-able then this rocks.

I can build a database btw but I have never used one with a website before, like I said I am new to PHP and MySQL, but I have used MSAccess SQL, and some basic html.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated,

Gregg.

Hi Gregg,

Anything is possible, and I think you would be able to pull this off with PHP/MySQL, but what you are trying to do sounds very complicated so it will probably take some time to accomplish. if you don't want pages to display twice,and you are going to choose them randomly from the DB, then yes you will need to flag that page record as used. I would suggest that you have the page built from the DB every time. Good luck on your endeavor!!!