The best way to go about this idea

Yes, this should be fairly straightforward.

If you had done a search before posting you would of found the following thread where this topic has been discussed and bashed out before:

http://www.webmaster-forums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17499

Buying a book is certainly a good idea. Or if you don't want to start from scratch (ie, reinvent the wheel) maybe you should look into one of the php/sql database programs that already out there. Try http://www.hotscripts.com for examples of these.

Hi & thanx Wil...
I'd actually seen that thread but before I got too into anything I wanted to make sure my idea was feasable and I wasn't leading my self down the garden path...
Now with your vote of confidence I'll start some serious learning...
Thanx again
DavidJaymz
p.s. I hope I can count on your help

Hi David

Absolutely! I won't be much help to you on the PHP side of things, but there's a real strong community of PHP gurus here at TWF and I'm confident that they will be more than willing to guide you through any hurdles you may come across!

Good luck!

david, have you ever thought about using something like phpNuke? You get a complete website in very sophisticated PHP that you can modify and pick at to learn with. That's what I started with to learn, and that was without a book. Just online tutorials. Now I'm coding my own shopping carts, forums, and chat rooms in PHP with MySQL.

Just a suggestion. Good luck.

OK...
With my host I get one mysql database... What I want to do is run a forum (ibforums.com) and do my idea above... Is this possible with just one database or will it get messy... I asked about getting another one, but my host said why don't you just use two tables...
Just looking for reasurance...

DavidJaymz

You can run it off of the same database just as long as they don't have tables of the same name. If they have tables of the same name, then you won't be able to do it unless you change the names of the tables, which would be quite painful to do and make upgrading harder. You might check with your host and see what they would charge for an additional db. Most are not expensive.

If your host is running only one database, it's good practice to give prefix to your table names. For example, if I'm running a script called 'twf' I might have the following tables in my database:

twf_users
twf_posts
twf_banlist

...

And this would ensure that my tables won't conflict with any other programs - well unless they used the same prefix .

Quote: Originally posted by Wil
If your host is running only one database, it's good practice to give prefix to your table names. For example, if I'm running a script called 'twf' I might have the following tables in my database:

twf_users
twf_posts
twf_banlist

...

And this would ensure that my tables won't conflict with any other programs - well unless they used the same prefix .

That's true, but a lot of the script install forums like this one, don't really give a choice of db_tables. You only have a choice of the db_name and connect variables.

That's too bad. I personally really like software to give me a choice of table prefix specifically for this option

I always have constants in a db_config file where I define my DBNAME, DBHOST, DBUSER, and DBPASS. Then I have a seriese of constants for the tables: DBTABLE_USER, DBTABLE_POSTS, etc.. Then users can define the DB connection info as well as each individual table.