I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with building a website mainly used as a front end for mysql?
I want to build a website mainly composed of forms with various views for queries and be able to produce reports.
My background is with MS Access and have very little knowledge with php and how its accomplished online. I’ve got an application that I would love to bring to life online but simply can’t get ahead with that because there is practically no literature on the subject. All tutorials and books written about php and mysql seems to circle around building social web sites and picture sites with blogs and stuff.
Is there anyone who would know of a really great book written explicitly for dealing with a large amount of forms, queries, tables and reports?
it’s not terribly hard to build forms and output data, I’ve got that down pretty good. The bulk of my questions revolves around designing, practicality and not go on spending 6 months building a module that I will have to trash because because it doesn’t’ really work together with my other modules.
I guess when you learn with MS Access you don’t really need to worry about anything aside from the data you insert into your tables. building the application that drives this data is a whole other story.
What specifically do you feel isn’t being covered by the books you’ve seen so-far? Even though you’re not building a blog, the skills taught in those sorts of examples should still be applicable to what you’re doing (forms, validating input, saving to/querying a DB, formatting output etc).
what I am not getting is how to work smart. In all the books I have read and tutorial that I’ve followed deal with one form, and one output. I essentially stop building my site because I know I am heading towards a dead end while following these books and tutorial.
example:
I have a module in my access database that keep track of Projects.
Within Project there are Tasks, within Tasks there are Locations, Location have Location Condition report lines, these conditions lines have inventory items assigned to them and so on and on and on. Inventory intertwine with Project, with Locations, with Clients, with employees, with Journals and Much much more.
I was able to make all these module work together like a charm. what I had to work with was the MS Access interface. if I want a form, I just create a form and give it a source for data and all is nice just like in PHP.
if you make a mistake, it’s easy to correct and fast. I have learned that if you don’t take precaution at setting your system properly in php, it could take weeks to debug the system.
what I am looking for to learn are the pitfalls to watch for while designing such a big application where not only your a manipulating the data but also have to build the factory that will process this data. I guess what I am saying is I lack in design skills and looking to polish my skills so I can see ahead what my current design will do later on when I start adding other mudules to the one I am creating. I;m not sure if I am explaining myself right. forgive me English is my second language.
I guess I should have mentioned that I have roughly 100 table to deal with. The current system that I am employing requires me to create 5 php files to work with every table. if I do the math I am looking at creating well over 500 files and figured before I get half way there and discover there is an easier way of doing it I might as well spend the time now to research it than later when its too late.
With judicious application of views Drupal may be able to handle this out of the box. If it can do 90% of what you need it’s still a PHP app and you can write custom code for it.
Views is core in Drupal 8, but 8 is beta. Drupal 7 has views, but it has to be installed as a separate module.
Views can do just about anything with custom handlers and plugins. However, I’m still a little lost as to how that pertains to this particular request.
I appreciate the tip but would prefer staying away from frameworks. I have been building this application since 2010 and growing. One thing that I learned throughout the years is to stay away from templates type codes because it takes more time adapting codes to my purpose than having to search and create custom codes that will do exactly what I want and in the format that I want. I also would like to learn php and become good at it so I can use the skills later on for other projects.
One of those pitfalls is using a one off framework that only you know. You’re doing clients a huge disservice building something that probably lacks any amount of documentation and/or expertise outside your own.
I would really, really, really suggest you read MLAPHP. Here’s a review of it. Even if you’re so anti-framework, you should definitely read it. It will clear up so many things for you and point out problems you’re not even aware you have.