Recently I was working on our old roster for everquest (cgi with ascii file for database) and I got an urge to try something new. I decided to go for PHP with MySQL, installed all the necessities and started on the site.
Some background info. I'm a C++ coder (business apps for work, games for fun) and always up to a nice new challenge
Most things went farely well, thanks to the great manual at http://www.php.net and thanks to the fact that the code was so intuitive (and C++ like stylewise). I've spend around 60 to 70 hours on it so far.
I use the index page to create 2 frames, the header logo and the body.
The actual pages show in the body, and mostly consist of a header, body and footer. It was tricky to get it all working (you all know of the frames trouble of course), but by making the page that created the frames a PHP script to, and submitting the body page it called back to that frames page, I got it all working. And the end result is much much more user friendly then our old roster.
I tried to show a LOADING screen/image for when the main PHP script is generating that huge character overview, but I couldn't get it working. I know it must be possible, because PHPMyAdmin does it to.
When loading the page, the flash logo (header frame) shows up immediatly, but the body frame first shows up as the default browser background color. When clicking a column for a new sort order, it again first displays the default browser background color, before showing the black background. I didn't find out how to fix this (if at all possible).
I also still have to create a session when the user logs in. That way I can make sure someone is really logged in when trying to update his/her characters, and not just hacking the site using the ?name= lines.
I also would have liked it if the PHP files didn't show in the status bar of the browser, but never found out how to do that (didn't look that hard either
If you would like to take a look at my site, and maybe post some feedback here, that'd be greatly appreciated.
Here is the link to my side (please view full-screen for best effect):
http://www.gameplayheaven.com/eqroster/
And here is a zip containing all the code:
http://www.gameplayheaven.com/downloads ... roster.zip
Many thanks in advance for your time!