Let it be known that I only have experience making websites with 5 or 6 pages. I'd like to make a PHP Gaming journalism site like <http://www.escapistmagazine.com/>

The first problem I can think of is that I would have to manually make a page for each game article; that path was obviously not going to work so I decided to store all the articles in a database. 

The problem with storing the content in a database was figuring out how to retrieve them. I attached a GET variable to the url so I could retrieve any article from an index.php file; however, I could not hide the GET variable from the url so I ditched that method. I have no free cash to buy a CMS and I have tried free ones like Drupal to great frustration.

Do I have to generate a separate php file for each article? What would a professional/veteran do in my situation?