Static and Dynamic content

Lou28 wrote:
> 1) is it possible to do this with one database

Yes.

> 2) Is it possible to get users to log in once and still be acknowledged as
> 'logged in' even on the static pages?

No, but dynamic pages can contain as much static content as you want.
When building a site, it makes more sense to use the same filename
extension for all pages. That way, you can add dynamic content to any
page without the need to redirect users from the old static page.

> Im good with xhtml and css but havent had much experience with databases.. so
> any advice would be great as Im looking to see which hosting package I should
> buy.

The first decision that you need to make is which server-side language
you're going to use. Dreamweaver supports ASP, ASP.NET 1.0, ColdFusion,
JSP, and PHP.

If you have no previous experience, ASP isn't a good choice because
Microsoft has switched all development to ASP.NET. So you would be
learning a technology that will eventually fade out (although I'm sure
it will take many years for it to happen). Also a lot of ASP sites use
Access as the main database. It's suitable only for small sites that
don't get much traffic.

ASP.NET and JSP have a steeper learning curve, and Dreamweaver doesn't
support ASP.NET 2.0. That leaves ColdFusion and PHP, both of which are
relatively easy to learn, and fairly widely supported.

--
David Powers, Adobe Community Expert
Author, "Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8" (friends of ED)
Author, "PHP Solutions" (friends of ED)
http://foundationphp.com/

Hi,

>>
1) is it possible to do this with one database
>>

although the contents of your static pages won´t reside in your database of course, you can well setup a database driven content management system (CMS) where some entries (or records) won´t grab the contents from the database itself, but rather point to the physical file on your server -- I recently did the same on a "mixed" system. This way it´s up to you to define whether CMS ID 1 is getting "linked" to, say, <a href="index.php?id=1">linktext</a> (this would be the "dynamic" option) or <a href="mystaticfile.html">linktext</a> -- but setting up such a mixed system is weird and a conceptual nightmare, and I only did that because my customer urged me to include his existing static pages within a new CMS

>>
2) Is it possible to get users to log in once and still be acknowledged as 'logged in' even on the static pages?
>>

Static pages themselves aren´t capable to e.g. let you include a session variable which would identify a visitor as logged in or not -- well, you can try that, but it won´t have any effect ;-) The only workaround is to show/hide the *links* to such static pages on other dynamic pages depending if the visitor is logged in or not.

Honestly said -- if possible, I´d suggest to make all your pages "dynamic" (that is, transferring the contents of your current static pages to the CMS), also because it seems that detecting the visitors "logged in" state has quite some importance to you in general.