VLE - How to store and work with content?

user23

Hey guys,

I need to store content files on the server somehow as on my website teachers add content through: a blog style layout and can add files for students to view etc. Students can only view the the content of the teachers whose subject they've registered to.

I cant get my head around how to go about achieving this.. can someone please assist me?

bradgrafelman

Have you considered using an existing CMS solution such as Moodle or Joomla?

user23

ya thats exactly what i should have done in the first place.. but I'm too far into it now..its a college project!

traq

If you are completely stumped by your original question, then you are definitely not "too far into it" to start over. 🙂

user23

Traq thats easy to say when you have no idea how much time and effort has been put in!!

traq;11012039 wrote:
If you are completely stumped by your original question, then you are definitely not "too far into it" to start over. 🙂

laserlight

user23 wrote:
Traq thats easy to say when you have no idea how much time and effort has been put in!!

So, at what part are you stuck, and what have you already done?

user23

laserlight;11012053 wrote:
So, at what part are you stuck, and what have you already done?

The user can register successfully and login.. they can then click on the profile page and their subjects are echoed. However I need these subjects to become icons so if maths happens to be displayed for example, the user can click it and it will bring you to the maths page.. the maths page content is stored in a LONG field in the maths table.. i dont know how to go about making the subjects links and how to pass the appropriate query string once its been clicked

laserlight

user23 wrote:
the user can click it and it will bring you to the maths page.. the maths page content is stored in a LONG field in the maths table.

I'm guessing that by LONG you actually mean TEXT. But why is there a maths table to begin with? Shouldn't there be a subject table, of which maths is only one row?

I would expect you to model a many to many relationship between subjects and teachers, so you would also have a teacher table, and a join table to link it with the subject table. Likewise, you would have a student table and a join table to link it with the subject table.

laserlight

user23 wrote:
the user can click it and it will bring you to the maths page.. the maths page content is stored in a LONG field in the maths table.

I'm guessing that by LONG you actually mean TEXT. But why is there a maths table to begin with? Shouldn't there be a subject table, of which maths is only one row?

user23

laserlight;11012057 wrote:
I'm guessing that by LONG you actually mean TEXT. But why is there a maths table to begin with? Shouldn't there be a subject table, of which maths is only one row?

I would expect you to model a many to many relationship between subjects and teachers, so you would also have a teacher table, and a join table to link it with the subject table. Likewise, you would have a student table and a join table to link it with the subject table.

I have the following tables: users, teachers, subjects, school. and now i have added a table for each subject. The original subjects table stores the subject names and echoes them on the profile page. However, when the user clicks a subject i want to send them to the page subject.php but it will be appended with the content from the right table eg..maths, english etc

user23

and no i mean LONG as its going to contain a lot of info

laserlight

user23 wrote:
I have the following tables: users, teachers, subjects, school.

That sounds fine, though I wonder if the users table should be named students instead, or if all teachers will also be in the users table. Also, if you want to use plural names, then school should probably be renamed schools.

user23 wrote:
now i have added a table for each subject. The original subjects table stores the subject names and echoes them on the profile page. However, when the user clicks a subject i want to send them to the page subject.php but it will be appended with the content from the right table eg..maths, english etc

The content should also be stored in the original subjects table. Do not have separate tables for each subject. With just a single subjects table, selecting the content given the subject is easy.

user23 wrote:
and no i mean LONG as its going to contain a lot of info

If LONG is indeed a valid column type, then it is probably a numeric type, so that would be a wrong choice for the field. If you just mean that the field will contain a long string of text rather than LONG as a type, then fine, but then writing "LONG" instead of "long" is just misleading since the convention is to fully capitalise SQL keywords.

user23

laserlight;11012065 wrote:
The content should also be stored in the original subjects table. Do not have separate tables for each subject. With just a single subjects table, selecting the content given the subject is easy.

Ok if its easy can you guide me?

bradgrafelman

Isn't that your professor's/teacher's job?

traq

user23;11012063 wrote:
and no i mean LONG as its going to contain a lot of info

There is no LONG datatype in MySQL. "LONG" is an alias for MEDIUMTEXT, but this is only for compatibility.

If it's really "really long," you might just use TEXT instead (~4GB vs. ~16M😎.

user23 wrote:
Traq thats easy to say when you have no idea how much time and effort has been put in!!

not really. Some of my early projects started over (sometimes when they were more than halfway done) several times, as I learned more about how to write them more efficiently. This was good for my own learning process, but the hardest lesson was that sometimes, if a suitable finished product already exists, you need to just use it.

Even if you are after the learning process more than the finished product, you would benefit from taking one of those products and looking at the code, and seeing how they did it.