Just learn php or a CMS and start using it. It's a way to generate html for the users browser. That can be done based on anything, such as a page with the order status from the database based on the order-id or a page with the right story based on the date.
If you can't find it all ready on the Internet, you'll have to do it yourself or pay somebody (such as your hosting company) to write it for you, either from scratch or by configuring a CMS. That seems OK to me.
Kees
I want to create content that is generated by date. For instance, I might want to write 5 stories in advance, and have one automatically display at midnight on Tuesday, a second one display on midnight Friday etc... I don't want it random as could be done with javascript but want to be able to define when it appears and have that work for several fields on a single page. Basically I want to pre-set dynamic changing content without having to be constantly signing on for every scheduled change.
Preferably, as a novice programmer, I would like to use a simple friendly environment where I just create the fields and select the dates and html content to fill those fields. That is all I need and unfortunately, I can't find such a program and all the CMS programs that do it are way overboard in features, size and complexity.
I know that it is probably possible to at least get part of such a system by writing perl code that creates includes from a MySQL database, but I am not sure where I would even start and I really don't want to get stuck for weeks trying to get this working and then tweaking/maintaining it long term as well. I also currently don't have access to a calendaring system or cron jobs which I suspect would be needed if I did it myself.
Seems like this would be a fairly common problem and there should be some simple programs out there that do this. Any ideas what other website operators do about this? Are there any hosting companies that provide a free service like this? The one I am using wants me to pay for a new custom program. Considering they claim to host 200,000 sites I can't believe I am the first and only client to ever ask for something like this!
I am on a linux/apache server with MySQL and the usual perl/php modules. Again, no access to cron jobs.
Thanks!

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