creating a database for a website

[danny_galaga]

What are the chances of me succeeding? Basically I want to make a database of some magazines I have, so some of the (variables I suppose they're called) include date of publication, issue number, article subjects, manufacturers etc. My site is hosted on godaddy and I've gone there to set something up, but they dont really give you a clue as to what to do. Fair enough. Do I need extra software to do this? I'm using a Mac by the way.

If it's all too hard I'll just list everything as plain text and advise people to hit CTRL/COMMAND-F 

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Does it explicitly need to be a database? Would a Google Doc Spreadsheet work?

What do you want to do with it?


Databases for webpages will be hosted on whatever server hosts your webpage, and then accessed with some kind of scripting language running on the server as well. The most common is probably MySql/PHP. GoDaddy probably gives you access to PHPMyAdmin, which is a webbased database access program for MySQL.

[jrivelli]

Hey that would actually be fairly easy to do with Drupal. You can get Drupal at Drupal.org and actually Godaddy has a 1 click install for Drupal. Wordpress can accomplish this as well, but Drupal is way more simple and will do exactly what you want to do. You can get the 'views' module to then display the module. Use the CCK module to create a form to enter the info. I deal with Drupal all day so heck....if you want I can quickly install it, create the form for your info and make a simple views display to show it if you want. Should only take me an hour or so.

[lordnacho]

Try Google Books.  There's a My Library section, think it works for publications as well.
You can have a webpage view of your library or export to xml.

I barcode scanned a bunch of books for a donation drive at work, imported them into Google Books.  Made the list public and sent it around the company.

[stu33]

I'll second Drupal.  Very configurable, and you can have a great site going in little time without ever seeing a drop of code.

[danny_galaga]

Google Doc Spreadsheets sounds promising. I'll have a look. And Drupal as well. I started looking at this:

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql

which for me looks scary, although I think I could probably cut and paste most of his example. But it's the 21st century, something with a GUI would be much better for me. No point having computers that run magnitudes faster than ever and still be tapping in code for everything!

[danny_galaga]

I'm having a hard time trying to even find exactly what it is I need. Pretty much exactly what I need is like the default menu in mame32. Where you can click on any column and it arranges the data in order. In this example, I've arranged it by year. What am I searching for to do something like this?

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

there are endless ways to do that. it looks like what you need is going to be whatever has the least setup time and the easiest to operate. i'd do a lot of looking at the google spreadsheets. it will probably get you 90% of what you're looking for with no effort.

[danny_galaga]

I posted the same question on another forum at the same time. Someone lead me to this:

http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/

By basically aping his webpage and uploading the sorttable.js file I've gotten to this stage:

http://dannygalaga.com/table2.html

as an experiment.

Pretty damn close to what I wanted. I have noticed that as it stands, I have to fill every space in the table for it to work properly. So for instance I've had to put '1. Spring 1980' in seven rows. And 'The Answer' 3 times, as well as the writer of that story, 'Stan Lee'. If I don't fill every space, things get screwy when you click on different headers. If that's not easily fixed, Then I'm still really happy with what I'm doing so far (",)

The google docs I found to be too ugly, and too slow by the way. But thanks for all the replies. I'm amazed I've gotten this far!

[jrivelli]

Hey man very cool! Pretty sweet you have gotten that far and it seems that is mostly what you are looking for

[ark_ader]

I'll second Drupal.  Very configurable, and you can have a great site going in little time without ever seeing a drop of code.

+1 also.

You can use Mysql and control it with PHP.  Lots of books on the subject.  Real easy to.

[danny_galaga]

I'll second Drupal.  Very configurable, and you can have a great site going in little time without ever seeing a drop of code.

+1 also.

You can use Mysql and control it with PHP.  Lots of books on the subject.  Real easy to.

Books? BOOKS? I don't need no steankin books!!  

I'm happy so far with what I've got, only thing is as that database grows, it's going to make for a huge webpage, so I just have to discover how to make the whole database work over a number of pages...

edit: This list will be finite (there were 35 issues of the magazine) so I thought I'd just extend that test to approximately where it should end up- about 480 rows. Not too unmanagable...
My other project will be larger, and continuing to grow. If I can't do a fancy 'database page wrap' then I'll just have to spread it over two or three pages and  each page will have to be individually searched.


jrivelli, can Drupal do a  'database page wrap' (I don't know what it's actually called)? I may have to investigate...

[jrivelli]

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by page wrap, but if you mean divided up by pages then yes you can. For instance, with Drupal, you can define how many you want per page super easy. So if you have 100 items you can do 10 pages of 10 or 5 pages of 20 etc.

Is that what you mean? It also has some pretty killer options for how you want the page #'s etc to look.