Building a Website

[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. :)

[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.

[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.

[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

[Thomas Thelwall]

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

[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.

[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".

[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.

[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.