Ok, so this is my original topic; here.
In this post here, SimonForsman suggested that I updated my updates page using a database so that I don't have to keep editing the original updates.html file.
Since then, I've added a login, registration, etc to the site from using a tutorial. Now, what I'm wondering is two things... How would I go about having different permissions for each user, what sql commands should I enter into the database and why - higher than your average members' level would have to be updated from a present administrator if I'm correct? And also, how would I go about making a new database for the updates? I've attempted searching and haven't been so lucky to find anything that could explain how it all works. - although saying that, I suppose it's almost like a blog feature? I'm sure I could find something along those lines..
Again, I'm sorry for the "nooby" questions, but I guess everybody had to learn somewhere.. 
Thanks a lot. 
Starting with the updates system, The easy way to start is to ignore the login and input portions of it to start with, just change the update.html file to read the relevant information from the database, you can add new entries and update the database using the tools that come with your database (or third party tools if you prefer those) to start with.
First off, create a new table for the updates, based on the current data you have on your updates page you can get by with 3 columns (technically speaking you could use just 2, but i find having an identifier column to be a good idea in general).
Thus we start by creating the table: if you're using mysql you can do this with the text based mysql client by entering the command:
CREATE TABLE news (id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, date DATE, text TEXT);
you can then add a new entry to it using:
INSERT INTO news (date,text) VALUES(CURRENT_DATE(),"Adding some database voodoo");
(There are graphical clients that allow you to create tables and add new entries using a point and click interface aswell)
your new update page would then look like this (The change is basically that i removed your list of news with the php code (the "big" <?php .... ?> tag)
update.php
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Development Updates</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stylesheets.css">
</head>
<body>
<!-- Site Nav Menu -->
<ul class="navbar">
<b>Site navigation</b>
<li><a href="http://realitysleeps.com/index.html">Home Page</a>
</ul>
<!-- Useful Links -->
<ul class="navbar2">
<b>Useful Links</b>
<li><a href="http://makewebgames.com/">Make Web Games</a>
<li><a href="http://gamedev.net">Game Dev</a>
<li><a href="http://codingforums.com">Coding Forums</a>
</ul>
<!-- Main Content -->
<h1>Reality Sleeps Updates</h1>
<ul>
<?php
$sqlConnection = mysql_connect("localhost","usernameforyourdatabaseaccount","password"); //change those to match the required values for your database
mysql_select_db("yourdatabasename",$sqlConnection);
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY date DESC;",$sqlConnection);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo "<li>".$row["date"]." - ".nl2br($row["text"])."</li>"; //the nl2br function replaces newlines in the database text entry with html linebreaks, you can skip that and store html directly if you prefer
}
mysql_free_result($result);
mysql_close($sqlConnection);
?>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
This basically fetches the necessary data from the database and you only need to make changes there to change the content of the site.
the insert query i showed above the code can be used to create new entries from php aswell, i'd leave that as an exercise for you, the key things you want to look at are:
1) html forms (input fields, buttons, etc)
2) The php $_POST variable (which you use to get the contents of the form into your php code).
3) the mysql functions (or equivalent if you're using a different database)
4) the INSERT and UPDATE commands (SQL).
To keep things simple you could just make a user id or username check for posting updates (If the username is admin or the userid 1 (or 0) you allow it, if not well.. you don't)
To add permissions to your login system you could basically add one permission column to the user database, personally i'd use an integer bitmask for the permission so that for example:
1: Allowed to post comments/etc (normal users got this unless you remove it)
2: Allowed to post updates/etc
4: Allowed to delete/modify useraccounts
a normal user would thus have a permission of 1
an admin would have 7 (1|2|4)
to check if a user has the appropriate permission to post updates you'd basically just do:
if ($user["permissions"]&2 != 0) {
//Allow it
} else {
//don't allow it
}
Its a good idea to make an array like
$permissions = Array(
"Comments"=>1,
"Updates"=>2,
"UserAccounts"=>4);
as it would allow you to do if($user["permissions"]&permissions["Updates"] != 0) instead which makes it a bit easier to read (and saves you the hassle of remembering exactly what each number stands for)
The reason this works is quite simple:
& is the bitwise and operator | is the bitwise or
if we use a 4 bit integer then
0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0100 = 4
1000 = 8
bitwise and basically checks if a certain bit in 2 numbers is set in both of them so taking for example 11 (1011) and 3 (0011) gives us:
1011 &
0011
------
0011 (3) // The bits in the result is set if the same bits in both operands are set aswell.
if we use the or operator instead and the values 4 (0100) and 10 (1010) we get:
0100 |
1010
------
1110 (14) //the bits in the result is set if the same bits in either of the operands is set
(There is also a bitwise exclusive or operator ^ that sets the result bit if the bit in exactly one of the operands is set so 1010 ^ 1111 becomes 0101)
since all our permissions is represented by a single bit (1,2,4,8,16,32,64,etc) we can use the bitwise and operator to check if a specific bit is set and we can use the bitwise or operator to merge permissions.
This post is becoming rather long.
There are a few things in my example that you most likely want to change later on such as adding more fields for your updates (having a topic, a short description and a long text could be nice, then you can display the topic and short description in the list and when clicked on you display the full thing.
You probably also want to move things that are used in multiple places to separate files and include those using php (your menu for example looks like it will be duplicated on every page of your website, move it to a menu.php file and add <?php include "menu.php"?> at its place in all pages that use it.
There might be some errors in the posted code, i havn't tested it and i wrote it directly in the forums post editor.
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