lyrics site

p0pb0b

can somebody maybe explain to me how to make a lyrics website with browsing.. etc?
Like tell me db design... and possibly refer me to some tutorials/lessons

tbach2

well, that's rather a big order...

first of all, what content are you wanting to provide? How does that data relate to each other? What are you wanting the users to be able to search by?

Answering these questions will help you decide how to set up your database.

If you are wondering on how to make the database "properly organized", do a search for database normalization. There's one on some well known php site :rolleyes:

p0pb0b

I wanted a site like www.leoslyrics.com Like all the functions that site has.. any ideas? Can you help.. please

ksandom

lol, tbach2, your avatar suits your first sentence so well! 😃

anyhoo, p0pb0b, try to come up with some specific questions. Once you have done that, look about the forums (search is a wonderful tool, it works very well too). A large amount of answers can be found by reading through the forums since the chances are high that someone else has had the same problem.

php.net has some very good content. It tends to be very up-to-date... wonder why 😉

PHPBuilder Manual is excellent. In some places it does tend to be out of date. It does have some really useful stuff in there though.

Please don't take this post as a discouragement from posting, just please be a little more specific when posting. 🙂

p0pb0b

lol
yea I was just giving an example
What I wanted was like a database design..l so then I can work off that etc...
Could maybe one of you experts help me come up with a database design.. Im not doing this for any kind of business purpose.. I just want to learn...

drag0n

p0pb0b...
Well you sure did pick a pretty tough place to start at
But its a pretty extensive script.. it can extend to alot of php functions we dont normally use..
You should at least just start with "lyrics" and just lyrics section nothing else, no news, etc...
Alright.. so you want browsing capabilities... A-Z.. click and get all artists in db that start with that letter, then you list artists... and then their clickable and they list all the artists songs.. and the songs once clicked turns into the Lyrics..
and another thing just a friendly warning, no phun intended, but arent Lyric Sites illegal? Im not a legal expert... so the people who are.. please submit ur comments..
good luck

p0pb0b

Thanks for the post... I understand that.. but Ive never had experience before with DB design, so could somebody please help me come up with a nicely designed db, thanks
and are lyric websites really illegal?

p0pb0b

can you guys help? plz?

tbach2

OK, look at what leo's site has:

Artist
Title
Lyrics

That just about wraps it up, except for one thing: a field that uniquely describes each row, otherwise known as the primary key.

So, you have a table (let's call it songdata) with 4 fields: id,artist,title, and lyrics.

Now, since one artist can have many titles, you could make artist into a separate table, and have songdata.artist be a reference to the primary key of table 'artist'

Now you have two tables:

                     songdata:
artist:              [U]id[/U]
[U]id[/U]-------------------artist_id
name                 title
                     lyrics

But why make it so complicated, when the single table works just fine?

Well, what if you wanted to give out the email of the artist? Using the all-in-one table, you would have to add a field and add data in all of the records. With the normalized table, just add another field to 'artist', enter the info once, and viola! you're done.

tbach2

oops, forgot album...

                     songdata:
artist:              [U]id[/U]
[U]artist_id[/U]----------->artist_id              album:
artist_name          album_id<--------------[U]album_id[/U]
                     title                  album_name
                     lyrics

p0pb0b

Wow that sounds so simple, I asked a question in another forum:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10248427
Do you have any suggestions to the last post about planning?
Thanks for the database design.. now I need to plan my code out to grab and display the data right?

tbach2

Well, my posts on this topic were really meant to be an example, not hand you the db structure. I started with what you wanted to accomplish, then built a database. It was a flat database, but could be normalized (did you read the article I pointed to in the first post?)

When I realized that I had missed an important part (album), did you see how easily it fit in? Of course, if I hadn't realized that before all the data was entered, it would have entailed a lot of cleanup work. That's why the planning has to go in BEFORE you write a single line of code. (That being said, understand that we've all broken that rule, too 😉 )

Once you have the database all planned out (you know it has all the info you need and you know how it's going to be accessed) then you can start coding.

IMHO, readable scripts follow a consistant pattern:

Define/filter variables
Take action based on user input
Display default output
[/list=1]
As you gain experience, investigate the concept of separating logic from design (ie, templates). This will simplify your code and make it more readable, which is really handy if you ever have to come back to it.