First Time Mistakes

Anon

Hi,
I was just wondering if anybody could point out common mistakes that occur during the processes that go into the uploading, and running/maintanance of your first commercial php driven site. I'm 15 and have just finished writting a php/MySQL driven site for a local company in the UK, and wanted it to go as somthly as possible once it is nearly out of my hands. I am most worried about what happens once the site is up and it starts getting hits! The page works fine on my local apache server.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated,

BGS

Anon

QA is your best bet. I'm a typical programmer and I feel my job is done when the program does what I've asked it to. But your users aren't going to ask it to do what you built it to do. So you need to have someone or many someones QA the site. Just have them sit down at it and start punching keys like a bunch of rabid monkeys. This is the only way you are going to find those tiny little inconsistencies that your users will find in the first hour of uptime.

You should also write out some standard testing practices for your QA people to follow to make sure that everything works the way you think it should, but don't tell them how to do things. Just say I want you to create an account change your personal settings, look at some pages, enter an email. Whatever the basic functionality of the site is have them do it, but don't tell them how.

[deleted]

Quite correct. Bugfinding and functionality checks are most important.

And I would like to add that you should make sure you have some error-reporting or logging tool available.

Once there is an error you'll need all the info you can get about what caused it. An error log is very suitable for that purpose.

Believe me, it's far easier than spending an hour on the phone trying to understand how somebody is describing the error.

This is especially handy with SQL queries, because you can trap SQL errors and store the error along with the "offending query" in the log.

During the startup phase you might even consider an event log, where every "major" event, such as SQL inserts and updates, and user login/logout etc are stored. That will give you a better idea of what is going on and what could become a problem lateron.

Anon

Can you tell me how I can create an (error/action) logging system? Have had a look through the manuals but can't find anyhting with I find help. Have I over looked the obvious?

Thanks,

BGS

Anon

I've never seen anything is PHP that will do this for you. I think that vincent was suggesting that you code it into your system.

Something like:

$db = mysql_connect($host, $user, $password) or error_trap("Connecting to Database: $host/$user/$password");

Then have a function that you've written that will take the string that you've passed to it and append that to the end of a file that you can then check. It should probably log alot more information than just your thrown error like data and time, page error came from, etc.