Database for Social Networking Site

[Fenix [Youth Director]]

Hello,
I am in need of advice or examples of how I should build my database
for a small non-profit youth computer gaming organization. I am a
beginner at database design and I know this project will take some
fairly complex database structure. Here is what I have planned:

The site will function a lot like the hit social networking website
Facebook.com... . each user will log in and have his/her own "wall"
where friends can leave messages, view a profile, and see pictures,
and other stats from that user. I plan on adding a PM system where
they can also send private messages to one another.

I hope to do this using PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, Flash, and some XML.

Please offer any advice or examples you can.

Thank You,
Andrew

[Ivan Marsh]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:02:35 +0000, Fenix [Youth Director] wrote:

Hello,
I am in need of advice or examples of how I should build my database
for a small non-profit youth computer gaming organization. I am a
beginner at database design and I know this project will take some
fairly complex database structure. Here is what I have planned:

The site will function a lot like the hit social networking website
Facebook.com... . each user will log in and have his/her own "wall"
where friends can leave messages, view a profile, and see pictures,
and other stats from that user. I plan on adding a PM system where
they can also send private messages to one another.

I hope to do this using PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, Flash, and some XML.

Please offer any advice or examples you can.

Unless you're doing this as a programming project download one of the many
that already exist, install it and customize it to your liking.

[Fenix [Youth Director]]

Unless you're doing this as a programming project download one of the many
that already exist, install it and customize it to your liking.

I prefer to attempt it on my own so I can know the application inside
and out. I just need a bit of advice on the database design.

[Ivan Marsh]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:42:22 +0000, Fenix [Youth Director] wrote:

>Unless you're doing this as a programming project download one of the many
that already exist, install it and customize it to your liking.

I prefer to attempt it on my own so I can know the application inside
and out. I just need a bit of advice on the database design.

Cool. The best advice I can give anyone about database creation is to get
a decent grasp of database normalization and indexing.

[Fenix [Youth Director]]

Cool. The best advice I can give anyone about database creation is to get

a decent grasp of database normalization and indexing.

Can you explain that a bit?

[Geoff Berrow]

Message-ID: <11************ **********@o61g 2000hsh.googleg roups.comfrom
Fenix [Youth Director] contained the following:

>Cool. The best advice I can give anyone about database creation is to get
a decent grasp of database normalization and indexing.

Can you explain that a bit?

Not in a way that would help. But this may illustrate the problem
www.ckdog.co.uk/normalisation.ppt

--
Geoff Berrow (put thecat out to email)
It's only Usenet, no one dies.
My opinions, not the committee's, mine.
Simple RFDs http://www.ckdog.co.uk/rfdmaker/

[Henk verhoeven]

Ivan Marsh wrote:

Unless you're doing this as a programming project download one of the many
that already exist, install it and customize it to your liking.

BEWARE: the existing one will soon release a new version. If it's just
adding features you can ignore it and go on with your own customized
version, or you can decide that those new features are worth the effort
of re-applying all the changes you made to the new version. But sooner
or later there will be a security update that you really have to
installe otherwise hackers will get at you sooner or later. Probably
sooner as those hackers nowadays have already automated searches for
older, vurnerable versions. So basically you need to install the patch ASAP.

But the patch does not patch your obsolete version, it patches the now
10 version numbers newer version. As you look into the code it is not at
all clear of what changes the patch exact consists of, as it is shipped
wiht an hundred or so other changes. The code you venture into is at
some places qoute different from your old version and you have no idea
what these differences actually do in terms of how the software works.

IOW, sooner or later you need to update, and the longer you wait the
harder it gets. In the best case you have preparerd for this, use CVS or
some other version control system to reapply your changes and have unit
tests so you can quickly veryfy wheather everything still works as
expected. But we don't live in an ideal world, your updating effort can
easily become your updating nightmare.

Greetings,

Henk Verhoeven,
www.phpPeanuts.org

PhpPeanuts is an application framework you can use to boost your
productivity. It has a specialization layer that allows you to keep your
own code separated from framework code. Changes are usually specified
upto individual methods. If an error occurs in development it outputs a
walkback so you can at least see where it comes from. Building unit
tests for your own code is nevertheless highly recommended, just like it
would be if you had built everything from scratch.

[Ivan Marsh]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 23:35:55 +0200, Henk verhoeven wrote:

Ivan Marsh wrote:

>Unless you're doing this as a programming project download one of the
many that already exist, install it and customize it to your liking.

BEWARE: the existing one will soon release a new version.

<snip bullshit>

IOW, sooner or later you need to update, and the longer you wait the
harder it gets. In the best case you have preparerd for this, use CVS or
some other version control system to reapply your changes and have unit
tests so you can quickly veryfy wheather everything still works as
expected. But we don't live in an ideal world, your updating effort can
easily become your updating nightmare.

Greetings,

Henk Verhoeven,
www.phpPeanuts.org

PhpPeanuts is an application framework you can use to boost your
productivity. It has a specialization layer that allows you to keep your
own code separated from framework code. Changes are usually specified
upto individual methods. If an error occurs in development it outputs a
walkback so you can at least see where it comes from. Building unit
tests for your own code is nevertheless highly recommended, just like it
would be if you had built everything from scratch.

So you're telling people not to use other people's software at moment and
promoting your own the next?

Sorry... but I try not to use software written by hypocritical morons.

[Sanders Kaufman]

Ivan Marsh wrote:

So you're telling people not to use other people's software at moment and
promoting your own the next?

Sorry... but I try not to use software written by hypocritical morons.

Gosh - that rules out an *awful* lot of software. :)

[Ivan Marsh]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:26:59 +0000, Sanders Kaufman wrote:

Ivan Marsh wrote:

>So you're telling people not to use other people's software at moment and
promoting your own the next?

Sorry... but I try not to use software written by hypocritical morons.

Gosh - that rules out an *awful* lot of software. :)

Believe it or not I thought of that while I wrote it... that's why it says
"try".

I'm currently in the middle of a Windows Group Policy Object problem that
I can't seem to fix.