Banner, Themes, and busy...

Hello, Im still on board, just been busy with work and my other love (Xbox 360). Since my last post I've worked on a banner for the site, got a few banners I've made and still working on a overall theme for the site instead of the blah look of it now. I hope to make some more contributions on the site aside from blog posts I just have to submit my works to Stone. The reason for it taking a long time is because its been years since I've worked on a site and I have forgot how much work it takes to upkeep as well provide content. Also working with Photoshop is difficult as I have never really got the hang of it. Well thats about all, until next post. Bye.

Session, Login, Logout Working!

This morning I just about finished the entire login scripts. It seems now that a User can register, login, and logout. More will still need to be done to clean it up but the bulk of that is done. Off to work will post more later tonight or tomorrow on my day off.

Sessions

Been having trouble with setting the session vars, I am able to do it, however I cant figure out exactly how to pull data from an SQL query and then save them into those vars. I have been looking online for different ways to do it and every way I have found dosent seem to work. I think its a version problem of some sort...I will keep plugging away at it. Maybe I will ask the site I am hosting with for input see if they can help.

I have wednsday and thrusday off from work and plan to spend a decient amount of time working on the site then. I hope to have alot accomplished, even if its not the login. I can work on adding movies, actors, genres, etc.

Registration

The registration page is nearly complete, John (coed234) and I are testing the registration. I have added a check for passwords to match the confirmed one. The sql for adding it to the database was trickey but after a few tweaks its working. I had an issue with the phone number column on the database I had originaly set it to an INT which dident work after john added his user with a "-" so I changed it to a txt field and exteded it to 12 chars long and added on the registration page a format at the end (xxx-xxx-xxxx).

Next thing on the agenda is to work on adding session vars so once a user is loged in they stay loged in.

New blog user

Hey just seeing if this post goes through. I'm working on some color themes that will make the site more presentable as well as visual pleasing to the eye. Nothing else to report other than Stone and I are just pushing ideas back and forth on what we want this site to be about. I'm probably going to do a video game review section and maybe a section for technology that's coming out. Alright back to the drawing board.

Email Check

This morning I was looking through some tutorials on user authentication, which led me to a new addition which unlike some things thus far actualy worked the first time. I added an email check along with the user check. So after it checks to see if the user already exists in the database if the user does not exist it checks for the email to see if another user name is registered under that email. A minor addition but nice to have something that works first time out. Tonight I hope to start work on the INSERT sql statement. Untill then...

Frustrating '@' sign

After going to work and coming home I loged into the site and thought I had lost all my login work I had done last night and this morning however one link was pointing to a different version of the file which means that most of my trial and error this morning and frustration probally could have been avoided.

On the bright side, one change (that I think I had tried this morning without success) was all I needed to get a part of the register.php working. I was working on checking to see if the user had already signed up and hence avoiding duplicate users. It seems at this point that all I had wrong was an '@' that shouldent have been there. something that I had noticed this morning. Guess it took a fresh pair of eyes and a break from it to notice it. I am glad its working now, and either tonight or tomorrow sometime I will be making the INSERT statements so that the registration page will be working completely (so to speak, obviously tweaking the code and cleaning it up will be in order).

Users

I started working on creating from scratch a user login script. I think I have the login working, however I ran into trouble on the register page. I copied the sql query from the login, where it checks to see if the user has access, basicly it checks for a specific user name and then checks the password. I copied that and got rid of the password part so it was only checking to see if the user was in the database in hopes to eliminate duplicate users, however it do sent seem to be working, basically there is an IF statement and if they query returns a result its suppose to say that the user is registered but its not returning a result at all so it always says that it can create the user (I ha vent made the actual sql INSERT statement so its really not doing anything but checking for now).

Since this was a copy and paste from what I already had working I am not sure whats wrong exactly. I hope to work more on it tonight and hopefully I will have a brainstorm. But as it stands now, with the user I entered manually into the database it seems to be working. Not that anything is secured or running off a loged in user but its a start.

Includes Working

After a few hours last night and a few this morning I was able to figure out why my include statement for the header files was not working. I think it was just a SQL statement mistake, and not even a mistake on my part. From what I read online I was doing it right however it was still halting the page every time it loaded and wasn't displaying anything from the file. The sql connect statement was like mysql_connect, but its working now with @mysqli_connect. Which is something I believe I read in my PHP6 book and the server is only running PHP5.2.5 so who knows.

I am just glad its working now and I can move on to more important matters, such as interacting with the database.

Started Work

Hello all,

As this is the first post I should probably talk about the outline of this blog. For starters my name is Chris, as well as a friend who will be posting and working with my on this site Will. I am just getting the beginning stages started, and we will be teaching ourselves PHP along with any other aspects of such as MySQL, CSS, and HTML. Some of this we are already familiar with and some we are not. This blog will be a timeline of our progress as well as what we are learning throughout this process.

Now to get down to business. I was able to get some work started on this website. What I am going for at the moment is a site that will act as a database to hold our DVD collection. It will house a MySQL database as well as have a php front end and hopefully a relatively decent HTML/CSS look. Tonight when I got home from work I talked to Will and created a database for our first attempt at this. I am sure we will have to redo the entire database as well as clean up code after we are done, leaving us with another project hopefully getting better and better at this as we go.

The database I created today includes 8 tables such as Titles, Actors, Genres, Users, as well as tables to relate the data together. I also was able to create the include file for the connection to the database which (in theory) will allow us to put one line of code on each page we want to connect to the database.

I am hoping in the next few days depending on how much time I have, to enter some data in the database by hand and test to make sure everything is connecting and make sure I can pull data out of the table. Then it will be on to making pages to enter the data. More on this in my next post.

also by the way the site address is http://stonec.org any comments, feedback, ideas, or just thoughts would be appreciated.