We Keep Coding

Using a form to save/update settings in a db and build a HTML with those settings from a template

My limited experience in web development as a self-taught led me to hit a wall while trying to figure out how to deal with this problem.
I need a form (map_settings.php) where the user should enter some inputs. Those inputs must be saved in a database table (MAPS) and then used to create the final HTML file (e.g. map1.html) for that specific user/inputs.
I know how to deal with using forms and saving submitted data to a database.
What is completely obscure to me is how can I use those inputs to automatically generate the final HTML.
My idea is to have a template HTML (template.html) and each time a user saves new settings via the form, I copy the template and replace some variables inside it with the actual data the user has input in the form.
If this might matter, the variables I need to replace in the template are also JavaScript variables within a <script> tag.
Can anybody help me suggesting one viable way to do this? I am mostly using JavaScript and PHP, without frameworks. I've also red about JavaScript templating engines, but I sincerely did not get if those are useful to me in my case.
Anyway, here is an illustration of what I would need to do, to hopefully clarify better my point.

Creating a static HTML file per user is not the way to go. Instead just have a PHP script like mapdisplay.php or similar.
Make the script so that if you type mapdisplay.php?map=1 in the browser then it will read the map ID, get the relevant settings from the database for the map in question and then generate some HTML to display them - of course you can have most of the HTML ready made like a template, and just use PHP to fill in the details from the database. This idea of getting data on the fly when requested, and plugging it into some HTML is how most web applications work.
If you create a static HTML for each user it quickly becomes unmanageable with a large number of users, plus it's hard to introduce changes or improvements to the template because instead of just updating one script file, you have to back and re-do every existing page. There are other disadvantages to your approach too, but I won't continue here - you get the idea I hope.

If I were you I'll make that in this way:
Don't use template.html
Don't get data from database to new file, but from form
Make database test before make file
To make template use
$template_text = "text...text...html...text...".$php_varible."text...text...html...text";
For other things about php see w3schools

creating multi lingual website

I am trying to figure out how to develop a multi-lingual website. My background in HTML, JS, CSS is not that broad (I have started only a week ago), therefore my understanding of this may not be the best.
For our example we will be creating three language mutations:
English (main one)
Spanish
French.
Here is what I have come across when I started searching for this under uncle Google.
The longest solution I can imagine: Create three folders named en, es, fr. These will contain the replica of the original webpage (e.g. index.html), but will be translated to respective language. Then on the top panel, you will have a button which upon clicking it will redirect used to a different folder (link is hard coded here). This solution is feasible if we are dealing with very small websites (with a few pages).
Second option I have found, was using WordPress plugins (found quite a few of those). Unfortunately, this solution is not viable, as I am not using wordpress to create a website.
Next option (which I believe would be the best), is to have one page for all language mutations, but instead of real text, you would insert some attribute with the key, which will determine what phrase should be inserted here. It could look like data-toTranslate('sTitle') (making this up). The question now would be, where would you store your texts? One option would be into a database, but I have not worked with them (under websites), therefore I would prefer something like a text file / csv file / or something like this. The problem I have with this solution (except the fact that I don't know how to do it yet :) ) is that I am not quite sure how website would react to this in terms of loading time. Maybe this is the best solution for a developer, yet the worst for the website?
Any comments, links or suggestions which would point me in the right direction would be more than welcome!
EDIT: as this question may seem too broad, I will try to trim it a bit down.
As I believe the option number three would be the best, then I would like to know the following things:
1) What do I need to create when I want to store simple key - value pairs (such as in this translation)? If I were in C#, I would e.g. create either simple XML or CSV file and I would parse it during runtime.
2) Can I achieve this with a simple JavaScript, or do I need to create some specific controllers / directives with AngularJS?

Create the english version of the website statically, as this is the main language. You should have a separate ID for every text element (and don't use obe word ids such as "a" "b" etc., so you can easily fibd them later.
Have a file on your server (text file works too) with the ids of fhe text tags, and the text in a format like
welcome-text | ["Welcome to the website" in Spanish]
-------------
Etc...
(Note: yoh need to store the translated sentences, but I don't know Spanish nor France)
Name your file to something like Spanish.txt.
When the page loads, download this file with javascript trough AJAX (this is where the static english version kicks in as a fallback), loop trough the text file and set the texts to the translated version.
You can of course use PHP with MysQL too, but I thought it is a bit overkill for 2 languages.
And yes, this can be done with 100% pure javascript, not even JQuery is required.

I normally using PHP to handle this multilingual. When every moment user view the website, it will set the default language to ENG. But, when the user select other language as the website display language, the website will reload and the PHP code will call the respective language folder to display all the selected language on the website. So, I think you should having few language folder, then dynamic calling each of the folder to get the keywords words and display it.

How is it possible to call data from an xml document into an html page?

I'm new to web development but from what I've learned so far, I'm sure what I want to do is super easy. I just haven't quite figured it out, yet.
I have an app that pulls external html pages. These pages all pertain to grain prices. I have about ten pages or so and currently to change the prices I open each page, find the prices and manually change them. What I want to do is just have all the pages pull their prices from the same document (I'm assuming this will have to be an xml or txt document) so that I just have to update that one external document.
The external document will be hosted on the same server as the html pages.
This seems like something I should be able to do simply with javascript and Ajax and I have seen many examples using just that. The thing is that in all of the examples I've seen, the ajax calls an entire text document instead of just one piece of it.
For example, I have an html page called Northern Alberta Prices and it lists about six different grain prices. I want that page to call the external document (let's call it prices.xml) and get all the northern Alberta prices off of it and put them in their proper places on the html page and then I want the Central Alberta Prices page to also call prices.xml and take the relevant prices off it etc.
What would be the best way to do this?
(I'm not able to use PHP on my server at the moment but any answers involving PHP would still be welcome.)
Thank you for your time.

You'd have to call the entire document and then interact with the specific node in the XML
without the actual schema there's not much more help I can give you, although there is an ok tutorial here:
http://www.sitepoint.com/server-side-xml-javascript/
which will help you understand the core concepts behind data manipulation

Yes, to use XML with PHP you can do this:
http://php.net/manual/en/simplexml.examples-basic.php
That pretty much says, you can do this:
<?php
include 'example.php';
$movies = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);
echo $movies->movie[0]->plot;
?>
... Which will get the Plot attribute from the first movie node. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
Edit: One more option I came across was using jQuery (javascript):
http://think2loud.com/224-reading-xml-with-jquery/

How to mimic Facebook's "link share" functionality using node.js and javascript

so what I want to mimic is the link share feature Facebook provides. You simply enter in the URL and then FB automatically fetches an image, the title, and a short description from the target website. How would one program this in javascript with node.js and other javascript libraries that may be required? I found an example using PHP's fopen function, but i'd rather not include PHP in this project.
Is what I'm asking an example of webscraping? Is all I need to do is retrieve the data from inside the meta tags of the target website, and then also get the image tags using CSS selectors?
If someone can point me in the right direction, that'd be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Look at THIS post. It discusses scraping with node.js.
HERE you have lots of previous info on scraping with javascript and jquery.
That said, Facebook doesn't actually guess what the title and description and preview are, they (at least most of the time) get that info from meta tags present in the sites that want to be more accessible to fb users.
Maybe you could make use of that existing metadata to pull titles, descriptions and img previews. The docs on the available metadata is HERE.

Yes web-scraping is required and that's the easy part. The hard part is the generic algo to find headings and relevant texts and images.
How to scrape
You can use jsdom to download and create a DOM structure in your server and scrape that using jquery on your server. You can find a good tutorial at blog.nodejitsu.com/jsdom-jquery-in-5-lines-on-nodejs as suggested by #generalhenry above.
What to scrape
I guess a good way to find the heading would be:-
var h;
for(var i=6; i<=1; i++)
if(h = $('h'+i).first()){
break;
}
Now h will have the title or undefined if it fails. The alternative for this could be simply get the page's title tag. :)
As for the images. List all or first few images on that page which are reasonably large, i.e. so as to filter out sprites used for buttons, arrows, etc.
And while fetching the remote data make sure that ProcessExternalResources flag is off. This will ensure that script tags for ads do not pollute the fetched page.
And yes the relevant text would be in some tags after h.

Using an HTML snippet for a template in JavaScript (jQuery)

I currently am working on a little app that requests user info from my server and displays them using a special template.
At first, I just hardcoded the little snippet in jQuery:
$("<li><div class='outer'><table><tr><td rowspan=2 class='imgcontainer'><img class='thumb'/></td><td><span class='username'/></td></tr><tr><td><span class='name'/></td></tr></table></div></li>")
I clone it several times.
It's ugly and I want it to have syntax highlighting and whatnot, so it would be better for me to have it in the HTML file itself.
Also, it will make merges easier so somebody can just change a line or two.
Is there a pattern for this? Am I OK putting it in the HTML file that I include this JS in (there's only one), and making it hidden using CSS.
The third option I thought of is just creating a separate HTML file and having jQuery request that from the server to keep it separate. Is this technique used much?
Also, is there any term I can use to describe what I'm doing? (It's harder to ask a question for a concept I don't know the name for)

I gave a similar answer on SO earlier today. What you are looking for is called micro-templates. John Resig posted this on his blog. Essentially you can get a json dataset and apply a template to the data to create html and update the DOM.