Desperate For Help

Sharif

Ok,

First let me introduce myself:

Name - Sharif
Age - 14
Hobbies - XBOX and Video Games and Music and Web Site Building

I am desperate for help with PHP and MySQL. I am trying to build a site like
www.teamxbox.com. I am trying to build my pages like some of their pages:

http://www.teamxbox.com/newsarchive.php
How do they list their articles like that and let you order it? They pull
out articles from their database and the they let you sort it by month and
year. They customized the output of the date and everything. How do I do
that?
http://www.teamxbox.com/games.php
How do they list that stuff like that? Alternating table colors
automatically. Also the option to sort it using these jump-down menu fields.
They also list the 5 recent news articles on every page.
They also let users put comments in.

Now I am not asking you to give me the exact code, but just teach me and
tell me how. I will do whatever you want, all except advertise or pay you
money (which I don't have). I am really good with HTML and CSS. Basic with
FLASH. Will even design a new site for you if you want - whatever - just
make an offer, and I'll take it. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE help me. I'm learning
PHP, Photoshop 7, and a lot of other stuff and all this is cramping my young
brain because I have a deadline. Please help me.

adamgeorge

Hehe. Hey dude.

I remember when I was 14, I wanted to build cool dynamic websites too, but just couldn't work out how lol.

"How do they list their articles like that and let you order it? They pull
out articles from their database and the they let you sort it by month and
year. They customized the output of the date and everything. How do I do
that?"

I used to ask those same questions when I was your age too... it's good. Means you're curious and want to learn.

The website you are talking about is database driven. It means the content from the pages is drawn from the database and returned to the users browser as HTML.

Read the tutorials and articles on this website about building database driven pages, or just anything to do with databases.

You will need to learn how to build a database first. This is where all the articles are stored.

Then you will need to learn how to extract data from a database. This is how they list the articles in the collumn you mentioned. Database allow you to order data when you extract it. This is what you were asking as well. You use SQL (structured query language) to 'talk' with a database and extract and order data. You will need to learn basic SQL syntax too.

And finally you will need to learn how to use PHP to communicate with the database and how to format data from a database as HTML. (The database should for the most part, store the text, and you use HTML/CSS to provide the formating, colors etc you see on the page)

There are tons of articles on this site. Just go slowly and read through them. If you get stuck ask a question and people will be more then happy enough to help out.

Good luck man,
-Adam 🙂

adamgeorge

Oh, and something I should have mentioned:

Do you have a webserver (Apache or IIS maybe) set up and correctly running? Although your web browser will happly read webpages not running on a website, dynamic database-driven websites will require a websever to be serving the pages.

First thing you should do is learn how to configure a webserver on your local machine, and install PHP and MySQL. If you're running Windows XP there is already a webserver installed 🙂 (IIS) Apache is good too, as it's Open Source and free.

There's heaps of references on this website on how to do all of this.

Let us know if you need any help.

cya
-Adam 🙂

Sharif

Hey Adam,

Thanks for your reply but I know most of this stuff. I know all of HTML and CSS. I have PHP and MySQL on my hosting account. I already created some databases. Did some basic database/php related things. But just can't seem to figure out how teamxbox.com is doing that stuff.

adamgeorge

Cool, that's a good start then.

So show me your schemas for the tables you are using to store the articles.

Are you sure you know how to extract data from the database using PHP? Because that summary box of the articles on that website is nothing more then a simple database query. You simply just print out the results it returns in HTML.

Show us the table structure in your database, and I'll show you how to do a example query to build a box like that. It actually pretty easy.

Although... really you need to build some sort of interface for inserting articles into the database first. No point displaying summarys like that if there are no articles to display 😉 Have you done that yet?

k, cya man.
-Adam 🙂

Sharif

I haven't really built a database for this yet. First thing, I want to set up the news pages. I already have a buttload of news articles to put in the database but don't know what fields to have (I'm using a MySQL by the way). I was thinking I should have: id, date, author, news for the news pages. What do you think?

adamgeorge

Ok, well that's what I was talking about with reading up on the website. There's heaps of great information on this on the site.

I will say though, that while you're young it's best to get into good programming habits. A lot of people on this board are more hobbist programmers I think because there seems to be a lot of people with bad coding habits, which you certainly would want to get rid of if you would one day like to take this up as your profession.

Have you learnt database normalisation yet? If not, go read some articles on that now. It's too much for me to post here.

You will need to come up with a normalised design to efficiently store this kind of data, and that will most likely span multiple tables.

Here is an example structure you could use, but really you need to sit down and work out exactly what data you would like to store, and then normalise it using various normaisation techniques.

Users:
iID int
sUserName varchar(50)
sFirstName varchar(50)
sLastName varchar(50)
sPassword varchar(50)

Articles:
iID int
iUserID int
sTitle varchar(50)
sIntroText varchar(255)
sMainText text
dtEntered datetime
bArchived tinyint

Notice how I've used normalisation to seperate the Users data from the Article data... you will need to read up on this. It can get a bit tricky when trying to store more complex data relationships.

Also notice I prefix field names with a i for Integer or s for String etc. I recommend you getting in the habbit of doing this for all of your variables in both PHP and MySQL.

Anyway, in the end it's up to you what data you would like to store... Have a look at some example forum/message board scripts for some ideas. I even learnt php by reading the source code to the phpNuke scripts which you can download for free.

When you're building database driven websites, the first thing you do is of course build the database tables. So when you've finished that then you can go on to the php side of things.

-Adam 🙂