At it's core, websites are made up of 2 parts: the content (including text and images) and the layout. To edit content on flat, non-dynamic sites clients would have access to all the code of the page. Forget to close a single div tag and everything could break.
Content management systems separate content and layouts by using databases and templates. The content - editable via a backend admin site - is saved in a database. The layout - with all the html and php code - builds the pages based on the design and pulls in the content.
Between the global site, 5 regional sites (2 of which are bilingual) and user registration this is probably one of the biggest sites I've worked on. According to Google Analytics there were over 200 hits the first day.
Oh this site was fun! They originally wanted to keep updating their data on a 3rd party site (why?) so I had to write php script that would parse through the html generated search results to get all the property info. My script also had to save the info in Expression Engine preserving things like categories and relationships. It wasn't easy but I won in the end.
© 2024 - Amanda Lutz * Web Developer