How can I build a simple Website that dynamically pulls in blocks of content? Software recommendations?

Question

I'd like to build a 40-50 page personal website that has the capacity to pull in blocks of content dynamically, based on what users to the site are clicking on. There would be predetermined blocks of content in the layout that would dynamically populate with relevant info for the user. I know Dreamweaver can do somethings like this, but I don't know how powerful it is. Is that the best? Or is Frontpage an option? I've heard of Ruby on Rails, but don't know if that will be worth investing a huge amount of time to learn since I prefer WYSIWYG editors, and my coding experience is limited to HTML/XHTML/CSS. Thanks in advance for suggestions and help.

Answer 1

If you want to develop dynamic pages then you are going to have to learn and use some form of scripting language. Favorite and free options are:
PHP (w/ MySQL & javascript = my favorite)
Perl
Ruby
Python
Javascript / Ajax / SOAP / NuSoap (Google Style).
Lua

I like PHP a lot. It's easy to use, very powerful, and had a huge community full of help. Plus plenty of books written on the subject.

Perl is old school, but there is less community help (in my experence, you mileage may very). It also has many useful packages and lots of books.

Ruby (Ruby on Rails) is great from what I've heard but I have little time with using it. It's a fairly new setup to the battle and so there are not as many books about it.

Python rides somewhere between Perl and PHP in my opinion. I'm not a big fan of the syntax tho, so I tend to avoid it. (I like C style)

Google just Released their java -> javascript setup. It seems a nice tool, but again I've yet to play with it much. (just no time :(
But I otherwise love using javascript.

Lua is such fun...there's not much support for web applications yet, but there have been web handling libraries written for it, and it's an extensible language. If you are familiar with nwscript then you are familiar with Lua.

*couple of notes:
Javascript run client side (the web browser that views it) all the others are running server side (your web site)

Perl requires the use of either access to cgi-bin or the installation of mod_perl
Perl is also difficult to develop in on a windows machine.

if you just want Content Management stuff then check out the software at http://freshmeat.net and http://sourceforge.net

Answer 2

The previsous answer is very good but this can be acevied in flash aswell and i can provide source that generates text on a page by reading .txt or .cvs etc