Is It Time to Convert? Migrating Static Pages to Database-Driven Web Sites

摘要

Those who create and regularly maintain static HTML Web pages on sites with a few dozen pages are doubtless aware of how repetitive this work can be. An update to an A-Z database listing page will also require updates to three or four subject pages and a full page providing details on the database. If you'd like to change the phone number or contact information in the footer, do you need to edit 500 pages? Changing it in one place and having it update everywhere would save oodles of time. Database-driven Web sites can make this sort of updating very easy. Using built-in features, such as global search and replace in HTML editors, can also help. The trouble is, global search and replace has its limits—each occurrence has to be identical (or accounted for with wildcards or advanced pattern-matching techniques). For example, an employee who maintains part of the Web site leaves. If your site posts who maintains each page, you can confidently search and replace the e-mail address, but you can't confidently replace the person's name without entering several variations: full name, initials and last name, and name plus position.