Member Avatar for Thomas Thelwall

Hey guys, my name is Thomas Thelwall and I am new to this place. I am currently in the process of building a website, and I am in desperate need of some help. The website I am building is nothing big, however, we are hoping that it will grow over a period of time, we are producing something along the lines of a movie reviews website which will include reviews for all the latest releases. As you can imagine, this will require a lot of time and motivation, but there is just one problem. I am well aware that most websites like this usually use a database to store the necesary information, this can then be viewed as a webpage on a website, now I need to know if it would be best for me to create a new webpage for each review that is added to the website, or is my best bet to create a database in which the reviews can be stored in. If this is the best option, can someone please tell me how I go about doing this, because I'm afraid that I have very little knowledge about databases, and I may need some time to research it. Thanks for your time.

Oh and by the way, I'm only 15 years old, so please keep it simple, if you know what I mean. :)

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Member Avatar for pty

hi, if I were you I'd do a little research into PHP/MySQL; hosting is cheap and there are lots of companies to choose from. It is definately a better idea to back your website onto a database; it will save masses of time and effort in the long run.

Basically you'd have a review table (for arguements sake we'll call it reviews).

This table may include fields such as:
id (the unique review number),
film_title,
age_rating,
genre,
review_text (the actual body of the review),
review_summary (may use a couple of lines to summarise it for a list/menu etc),
reviewer

Then you'd simply have 1 review page and insert the data from the above fields as and when you need it.

The fields above would have to be normalised. This page is a good source of examples of data models.

Member Avatar for Thomas Thelwall

Thanks for your reply mate, it is much aprichiated. However, I would just like to pose one more question. I understand that it would be best for me to try to tech myself to program in PHP, but is there any software that I might be able to get hold of that is free and is able to set up a database for me? I have MS Access, but I don't know if this is the right software for what I want to do.

Member Avatar for pty

xampp is what you're after. It is a one click installer for mysql, php, apache and some other bits and pieces.

Once you've got that up and running it should be a little clearer.

There is documentation and FAQs and stuff on the site, if you get stuck best asking back on here or in daniweb's IRC channel

Member Avatar for Thomas Thelwall

Once again, thanks for your reply, I will install it tonight when I get back home from school. Cheers mate.

Member Avatar for Thomas Thelwall

I don't wish to seem a pain, but I'm afraid that I haven't the faintest idea how I'm supposed to do this. I've installed Xampp, but even after reading through some of the documentations, I still have no idea how I'm supposed to do now. Is there anyone who is willing to do it for me? I hope that this doesn't seem like I'm asking too much, if I am, then can anyone tell me what is the best alternative. Thanks.

Member Avatar for tgreer

There is no shortcut. You have to learn about PHP programming, as well as database design. Get yourself a good book on "PHP and MySql" and do the work. Most databases are very similar, but the design principles are very important to learn so that you create a database structure that can scale up well. You also need to learn the SQL language, which is a language designed to interact with databases.

Life doesn't come with "cheat codes".

Member Avatar for Thomas Thelwall

Well maybe that is the only best bet. In the meantime, I will have to just save all the pages as individual webpages until I can learn more about PHP and SQL etc. Thanks.

Member Avatar for pty

tgreer is right. I recommend the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development", although I have an older copy. I'm sure there will be something at PC World, or definitely on amazon similar. There is a PHP tutorial at W3Schools.com.

If you get stuck ask in the PHP forum or in the daniweb irc channel.

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