[totage]

From what I understand flat file is only good for smaller sites with smaller traffic volume. PHP and MySQL is much more stable and actually easier in the long run and can handle much larger sites and traffic volume. If you're serious about making money with your site, upgrading your hosting account would also be recommended.

Either way, I hope you found what you're looking for. If not, why not build your own?

[Sogo7]

Depending on the specific requirements you could get away with using a Yahoo Pipe to provide a constant supply of news data. Either just copying the RSS headlines or parsing subsequent pages for the useful content. Yahoo Pipes has an output module that POST data in a JSON format to a recieving page where it can be stored as a flat file and subsequently intergrated back into the site.

The Job Hunter Project uses the same method to store search results and place them into the page using PHP upon initial load, thus providing indexable content. Then when the callback function of the pipe kicks in the old data is overwritten on screen by javascript and new data is sent server side for storage by the YP JSON module. Pick any town on the map search and you can see it in action.

Remember even SQL databases are essentially 'flat files' just with a fancy set of controls, if all you are doing is storage and display with no complex queries then using something as simple as a txt file is perfectly adequate.

[Leder678]

Originally Posted by umlautbastards

I'll answer that as it has relevance in my situation as well; when you run a site and your host only gives you one or two databases (as is the case here @ 000webhost.com), you have a limited number of options if you wish to have multiple applications running on your site if you're thinking for-profit (membership/sales/auction sites, etc.). Unless you're highly experienced and know how to cram multiple, differently-named MySQL tables onto a single database (which I'm PAINFULLY going thru right now), flat-file resources are a real enabler to help plow through a domain website build. I'm REALLY happy about the resource that I gave out earlier, and am in the process of tricking it out exactly how I want thanks to its' utter simplicity, the ability to use PHP, and the light weight of the code framework itself - GENIUS .

Just to quote this... just name the tables like gamescript_users and forum_users etc. this way you may live out a million pages with only one mysql User and Database (however, in the longrun this may slow down your webpage, but in that case, it's time to switch host anyway..)