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I'm working on a site for a friend, and once again I'm up against my lack of programming skills... Let me see if i can describe what I need, and maybe somebody can tell me how to do it.

The site I'm building is about old comics, and each story will have identical formatting with the following information in the same location: Title, Issue Number, Publication Date, Publisher, Cover Artist, and the article. There will also be an image of the comic in the upper right, which can be clicked to open a larger image in a new window. There will also be links to a few scans of selected pages from the featured comic.

To complicate matters, there's already an archive of over 1100 previous articles that need to be ported over. I have them in a MySQL data dump, along with a massive collection of all the related images.

The problem is that I need to add some input boxes to the "new story" input page (or to an all new such page dedicated to this feature) so that the technophobic author can input his own new stories. Ideally the story template would automagically put the scanned cover into place on the page without the author having to type in any code; it would just place "image 1" as the featured picture.

To complicate matters further, he wants a splash page that includes a small image and text about the current article which should update at the same time that the corresponding story is posted.

I've added a new table to my database that includes all the same fields that the old site used; now I need to figure out how to create new pages calling the data.

Is this something that would be beter done using a PHP-enabled Static Page, and if so, how would I go about implementing a custom template for those pages?

If need be, I can throw money at somebody and have them do it for me. I'm a graphics guy, not a programmer.

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I have no idea what I'm doing.