Displaying top 5 stories on a website...

[Mr.CookieMonster]

Hi,

I am very rusty with PHP firstly. I am going to be making a music website soon, so i would like to wiegh my options. I have heard about CMS systems:

1. Joomla
2. WordPress

Is it going to be better to create a site with a CMS or is better to rather use the traditional way (coding it and everything). Also, I would like to know if this is valid:

I want to create a box that will display the top 5 stories. I have all my news stored on a database. I will sort these on a page (news.php from newest to oldest (using the date)).

If I create a mysql query for that box that will select everything, sort by date and display 5, will this display only entries with id 1 - 5 or the top 5 stories (sorted by the date)?

The code for the box with the top 5 will look like this: ("SELECT * FROM database ORDER BY date LIMIT 5")

Can I also get some links to websites that will help me with this issue?

Thank you so much for helping me

 

[Neverwhere]

Wordpress does what you're looking for pretty much out of the box..or with a simple plugin or two.. no need for any sql of your own.

You can write up all your news as "posts" and put them in a category of "news".. then you can display them where ever you want and pull them by date, by tags, anything really.. if you want them in the sidebar there are plugins that do this in so many different ways.

Finally, adjusting wordpress to look like anything you want is easy if you dabble in some simple php and css.

 

[koeksGHT]

For the ease and security I would say use a CMS system, it will save countless hours and effort to start the website.

Just know people won't care too much about what software the website uses if it is open source or you coded it. They are interested in your product or service. You can set up a very nice site with a CMS very easy and just tweak it over time to suit your needs.