Creating a Directory from Excel or XML File

[erikgauger]

Hi all,

I have been managing a site on Dreamweaver for 12 years. Everything runs on templates and it works great. But now we are looking at a directory-style section that would include about 300 listings. I'd like to be able to auto-create 300 pages based on a file...but once created I want those pages to be editable locally...so Dreamweaver would only be fed these pages once.

I can't seem to find anything like this...there is an XML template feature, but this seems to be for only one page at a time. A long time ago I would use a datafeed generator which allowed me to feed hundreds of pages through dreamweaver based on an excel file...thanks!

[BenPleysier]

What you are looking for is a database driven site, where you create one document that shows hundreds, and in some cases millions, of views, If the data is snesitive, then you cannot go past a serverside database. If the data is not sensitive, you may get away using a JSON file on the client.

[erikgauger]

Thank you Ben. I will look into the JSON route first. The data is not sensitive...one of the reasons I wanted to avoid database was that after import, each page will become more custom/manual and build out differently over time.

[B i r n o u]

In fact, what you're asking is something I do frequently, either using Javascript, PHP or Director (in its utf-8 version).
The idea is, that starting from a document containing structured data (HTML, Database, XML, CSV, JSON, XLS... and so on...), and from there, we can start and elaborate as many new documents as necessary, documents that are autonomous, physically independent of any external data, and standalone in a text-based file format.
Is that what this is all about?
In this case? do you know PHP? or Javascript? or Lingo? or any other programming language that allows you to do this?
It's true that the question then, for those of you who aren't familiar with this kind of approach, is going to be, "... but why not do it directly online...?...." but actually that's not the question... isn't it?