We have used PHP and MySQL to develop a dynamic central news service to support the needs of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Research laboratories, program offices and university joint institutes located throughout the US. The NOAA Research Hot Items allows users from each of the NOAA Research operating units to enter newsworthy items. The user has the authority to either make this submission available for public viewing, or can publish this at a later stage.

The Hot Items back end programs are written in PHP and connect to a MySQL database. Version 2 of Hot Items was implemented earlier this year and provided a second layer to the site in which each NOAA Research entity has its own summary page. Each layer of Hot Items has secure and public areas. Since users can be created to have one of three user access levels one of the issues that had to be dealt with in this site was to ensure users were authorized to view each particular page. Each page thus had to have its own access permission. This paper will discuss the technical detail of the Hot Items implementation and security model employed with the secure portion of the site. It will also briefly discuss the MySQL database implementation for this site.