I've got several pages about products that I want to load into a database and instead of creating a separate html page for each product, I was thinking of creating a single page that will display whatever product the user clicks on. Each product page will have a similar structure with its name, picture, description, bullet points for features (varies from product to product), price.
My question is if I want to store all those information in a database (I imagine I would need a different field for each paragraph, picture, name, each bullet point, etc) is there a way to get around that? To store all those information in a single field or as few as possible and still keep the formatting. It seems like I would be overloaded with the number of fields I have to manage.
I'm starting to doubt if this was even a good idea to begin with...
Do not store all that information in a single field. If you are going to do that, then just create the HTML page and save yourself the trouble of having a database that you aren't properly utilizing.
What you need to do is identify the relationship between all parts of your page. For example, if a single product can have multiple photos you would want to define a multi table relationship that defines a one-to-many relationship between the Product and ProductImage tables.
Grasping how relational databases relate to the data you are working with can be difficult at first and it might pay off to hire someone for a few hours to go over what you are trying to do and how to implement this effectively using a DB. Since it is a real world example for you it will be an excellent way to learn. Good luck!
You're not the first person to want to do something like this. It's a very common problem that has a well established solution. You need to use what's called a web content management system. WCMSs allow you to use a common template throughout your website while filling in specific stuff for each page. I recommend Joomla because it's easy to setup, easy to use, and most web hosts support it. But you can also look at stuff like Wordpress or Drupal. Wordpress is more blog centric though and Drupal has a steep learning curve.
Related
I am creating a CV website, but in difference to most I am trying to make it with database. I mean that usually such websites are static and all of the information is hard coded in the HTML. Since I am back-end developer I like to make it so everything including buttons and welcome messages are taken from the database. I am trying to store projects that I have worked on. There are several types:
Github Repository - a project that is done purely on github.
Work related - a project I have done on work and there is no github repository of it, only link to view the final result
UpWork or other freelance website - as a freelancer I have projects to fix something on a website and those projects can be viewed only on my profile there and I would like to list them with link to UpWork or wherever there is information on what exactly I was hired to do.
Now my question is - should I have different Entities and therefore different tables for these types of projects or should I have all of the possible properties in one table. For example if it is Github there is repository field and if it is work related then there is company field. If it is freelance it has link to the website I was hired on. Also there are different sub-types - web applications, desktop applications, games and so on.
As you can guess the changes are small (1 or 2 properties). I could very easily leave empty some properties and have another property projectType, but is this the right way? Should I have different tables and entities for them?
To give some info - I can work with both MySQL and NoSQL and I havent decided yet on which one should my website be made on. I am currently thinking about NoSQL. This means I am asking on how to store the projects on MySQL and NoSQL (by NoSQL I mean MongoDB). If it helps the languages I am choosing from are PHP (MySQL) and JavaScript (NoSQL)
I know that usually questions without code are downvoted, but this is more of a logic based problem as I know how to do it, but I don't know the best practices for my situation. This being said here is a small code for you -
console.log('Thank you in advance')
MongoDB lends itself very well to this exact situation.
You can create a collection where documents leave out certain fields if they are not needed for that type. The querying parameters of MongoDB allow you to check $exists on fields if you need to, and documents are stored efficiently, only taking up memory where a field is needed.
You can even setup a sparse index which is not required for every document. As long as your core document structure is the same, it is a good idea to keep them in one collection, and vary them based on their type.
I am building an e-commerce website for a friend, I have some knowledge of HTML and CSS but I wouldn't class myself as advanced on the subject. I said I would do it as a favor/experience.
I just have a question about displaying multiple products information. My page currently has 12 items on it, do I need to create separate pages for each of those products with some information on it like so:
www.shoes.com/trainers/shoe1.html or www.shoes.com/trainers/shoe2.html
etc or is there a more efficient way of doing it.
I only ask because after looking around, the end urls do not contain pages like the above but look more like the following:
www.shoes.com/index.php?id_product=1025&controller=product
If anyone could help me out or point me somewhere I'd appreciate it.
Store your products in a database, if at all possible. This way you can use queries to sort and filter your products easily.
You are further looking for a dynamic website (http://php.net/manual/en/tutorial.php), using, for example, a .php script getting the desired data in MySQLi, for example (http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_ref_mysqli.asp)
With this, you can create any lists and links using, for example, the product ID to refer to a product, like in your example ("?id_product=1025")
Your PHP script would look for id_product ($_GET["id_product"]) and use this to query your database and get the desired data.
What you want to do is a dynamic website. You build a database with all the products, and create a "template" html page for how you want the product page to look like. For that, you will need to know a server side scripting language, like PHP or ASP.
If you are only familiar with HTML and CSS, your only option is building a "static" website, by creating an html page for each product. if there's alot of products it will be tedious and ineffective.
I would suggest a ready CMS, like wordpress for example. It has many "store" plugins you can download. one of the is Woocommerce. it's free to download but has paid plugins. I use it and i am happy.
You have to paginate your data, to do this you have to create a database first then using any server side scripting language
for example this article guide you how to paginate your data with PHP
http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-paginate-data-with-php--net-2928
I will just explain two types URL
www.shoes.com/trainers/shoe1.html
www.shoes.com/trainers/shoe2.html
The above method is a good way when you look at SEO point of view. Search Engine efficiently works with static URLs.
www.shoes.com/index.php?id_product=1025&controller=product
Second means, you are building a website with PHP and you are passing product id in URL as ?id_product=1025. As you mentioned if you are creating E-Commerce website static page design will be a bad practice. Since you want to design each product page.
My Suggestion is you can try Magento which is having most of the features of E-Commerce Web.
I've got a lack of understanding at the moment. I'm developing a website with many articles and instead of creating a .html page for every article, I thought about storing the text into a database and get it from there (somehow) again.
I'm totally unsure if it is the common way to store text in a database. How do all of the "big" websites handle the mass of articles they publish? They won't create single pages neither but instead using a database, I guess.
But how can I achieve this? How can I store whole html files with divs and jquery and stuff into a database and get them when clicking on a link? Might XML be a keyword?
First of all, you need to clearly understand how things should work.
Clearly the approach of creating a page per article cannot work for multiple reasons:
if you have a huge number of articles you'll need to have a huge number of pages
if you need to change something small in design, you'll need to make that change for every single stored article
What you need to do is to create a more generic page, which has all the common stuff for all articles in it (a place for title, a place for content). The articles themselves can be stored in a database. When opening a page for a specific article, your application should place the title and content in the right place in that page.
This approach is universal _ it will work for any number of articles.
The keywords you are looking for are : Dynamic, Content Management.
In order to achieve this, you should learn a scripting language, PHP for example.
You will find a lot of tutorials to get started and how to make your website a bit more dynamic.
But you were right about the database part, most blogging systems and other content providers use databases to store all of this in data tables. PHP (and some other languages) would allow you to interface the database and the content you provide to your users.
You should look into using a web development framework like ruby on rails. Rails has templating that essentially let's you define variables inside of your html (e.g. "text of article").
As for storing the text of the article, the way I do things like that is to store them in a file on my server and then fetch that file using AJAX and then insert into an html file.
Most sites accomplish this by having templates, in which the common-to-every-page html is stored in a file. Page-specific data (article text, etc.) is stored in the database and "inserted" into the relevant parts of the template before returning to the client.
download word press and check how it work! it will help you
http://wordpress.org/download/
i have an entity with a lot of fields(like facebook user Information with multiple levels like Basic Information, Contact Information, and...). and i want to use it exactly like facebook . i mean i want several tabs to put related fields in there. the easiest way is to store all of them in a table but it's too nasty . is there any way to do this better? i know something about database hierarchical design, but is there a way to do this in symfony 1.4 and use it's form creator either?
thanks.
First of all: where do you need help? In the view or in the model?
If you want it too look like Facebook, we're talking View. This has nothing to do with Symfony, but just HTML (with some CSS/JS probably).
If you're talking about how to store this information: the information your describing isn't "hierarchical". Hierarchical is about trees and things like that, most of the time with an almost infinite depth.
Here you're talking about a strict structure (you, as developer, know exactly which fields you want to render, and define these yourself). You could look into Entity-Attribute-Value stores. But beware: when implementing some like this in mySQL, it won't be easy to do 'complex' queries. (Even a query like: "List all people in New York, older than 30 years old", is not rendered easy).
So why won't you go with a table with a lot of columns? There's nothing nasty about that! That you, as a human being, may have troubles viewing these data in phpMyAdmin, has nothing to do with how a computer manages this information ;-). You could split up the 'User' model in a seperate 'UserProfile' model (with a one-on-one relation), so you can easily refer to users on other pages (where you don't need all profile data).
You can use Doctrine Nested sets. It is basically a tree structure contained in your database. I have a demo of how this can be used, but the source code might scare you.
Take a look at the demo to give you an idea of what you can do. If you are leaning towards this option, then you should definitely check out the tutorial link I posted below to get started.
Demo
Source Code
Doctrine Nested Sets Documentation
Tutorial on Nested Sets
I'm developing a CodeIgniter based site that will be very multi language heavy. Plan is to launch with 5 langs but to rapidly expand. A lot of the content will be user generated and split across multiple tables. In the past I have used the built in language files but I don't think they are going to work in this case. What's the best way to do translations in the database. Should I have a translation table for each table in my DB, eg;
ProductsLang
RetailersLang
CategoriesLang
Etc
Or should I look at creating some sort of central dictionary table. Has anyone done this in CI in the past, couldn't find any existing libaries out there. Your thoughts would be much appreciated.
From my view it really depends on the solution you need - it seems like you're developing an online shop? If that's the case, I would combine both options. Static language files for labels (and other content that shouldn't change).
Although - IMO - the product database shouldn't be aware of an actual translation part; I would rather take the category table and put in the necessary languages as main categories and provide with product-specific categories below the language categories.
At this point you'd might be thinking of all the duplicate products attached to any given language category - but I believe this is a flexible solution for each of the languages.
And a simple script could allow for copying a language category to another, making translation available for the exact same products.