Stablemates Magazine and FirstBase Software teamed up to produce an online horse magazine, published twice per month. We needed software that would parse various sets of incoming data files, and produce categorized and organized text and photo advertisements.

So, we created the Photo Advertising System (PAS), a set of FirstBase tools that parse incoming CSV data files sent to us by StableMates, create databases of end user photo ads, classified ads, and calendar events. These databases, along with a set of photos, are used to generate thousands of new web pages for each issue.

Purchase PAS for $4995.

This production level software generates both a frames and a non-frames version of the magazine. In addition, the front end mechanism that loads the database uses multiple sources, including a database of vendors who desire a virtual brochure, various classifications of advertising text, and the calendar data.

All of this data is parsed to build the database used during web page production. Each complete category is processed as a group in order to properly divide the display into two fairly equal lists, and to salt the ads, evenly mixing photo ads with text ads.

The results are quite stunning: using a FirstBase database and a set of macro scripts, without Perl, without SQL, without shell scripts, without any other plugins at all, a complete online magazine is updated, frequently and on demand.

This method of quickly generating large amounts of static web pages from database records provides a very accurate and effective method of web publishing. In addition, this particular example demonstrates extremely complex analysis during web page production based on the quantity of words and the type of each ad.

Here is a portion of the code used to generate these complex pages.

E-Store is included with PAS.

In addition to the generation and serving of the online StableMates magazine, FirstBase was used to develop a custom electronic store front that handles submission of text and photo ads, complete with a real time credit card verification mechanism. This live system is located here

All of these things are accomplished using the macro programming language from FirstBase.

Jump to the Live Internet Use of Photo Advertising System