Introduction

1. Introduction
2. Tools overview
3. Site structure
4. Database creation
5. Site configuration
6. Creating a Frameset
7. Creating the Menu
8. Contents Frame
9. Backend Structure
10. User Admin Page
11. Master Index Page
12. Detail Index Page
13. Conclusion

Building a dynamic website using Dreamweaver MX, PHAkt 2 and NeXTensio 1.5 MX (does not apply to NeXTensio 2)

- The complete Nextensio MX Tutorial -

Architecture decision

Why should we build a dynamic website instead of static one? The answer is simple: a dynamic website can be updated and maintained much easier than it’s static counterpart. Every page can be stored in the database making the site very flexible.

Tutorial goals

This tutorial intends to be a simple presentation of how easy you can build dynamic websites and an administration tool for such a site. Therefore we haven't paid any attention to the graphical design that is required in all regular websites. You can find a more detailed documentation and articles of how you can build a professional, good-looking, dynamic website on the Macromedia Dreamweaver website at http://www.macromedia.com. Our tutorial concentrates on the techniques used to create dynamic pages using Dreamweaver MX an PHAkt 2 and also the easiest way to build a Content Management System (CMS) using Dreamweaver MX and NeXTensio MX.

This tutorial describes the development of a dynamic presentation web site for a fictional company . The website will be used as an internal publishing system, containing articles and news concerning the company and will be named KTMLtutorial.

The NeXTensio MX distribution includes a printable version of this tutorial along with the zip archive of the KTMLtutorial website and the SQL script used to create the database and add the admin user in it. In case you have problems following the tutorial, or you want to jump directly to a superior development stage we have made two snapshots that are also included in the NeXTensio package:

Architectural Overview

From the website visitor's point of view, this is a simple web site that is receiving requests from the client's browser, verifies these requests, builds an output from the database and sends it back as a plain HTML response.

To help you understand the architecture, we'll present you our local network architecture used to create and run this tutorial web site. We have a workstation with Dreamweaver MX installed, a MySQL server running on a separate computer, and an Apache Web Server, with PHP installed, running on a third computer. The network drivers are mapped using a Samba server installed on the same computer as the Apache server. The databases are stored on the computer running the MySQL server.