Cantr II Discussion Forum

I'm loving this game and wouldn't mind trying my hand at something similiar. But I've no idea how to do this coding stuff. About the only database I've ever built is through MS Access and I know this kind of thing isn't any where similiar.

So what software do you use to write SQL? I liked the easy drag-n-drop features of Access but if this is something where you type everything into Notepad then I'm sunk.

Is there some sort of software that would let me build all these tables and such and have pretty pull-down boxes and wizards, etc.? I'm a visual kind of person and I need to see layout of tables and such--I just can't type code from memory. The language makes no sense to me.

Suggestions???

I'd also like to know about this. I remember borrowing some book from the library but noticed it wasn't handing web based databases at all but something in businesses on computer hard drive... I didn't get very far with it.

I've done a little PHP and SQL coding in my life, and the least expensive way to do it is the dreaded type-everything-into-notepad way. That's harder with the MySQL table manipulation, but I'll get to that. I'd imagine there's some sort of code generator out there, but it probably costs a good bit of money and doesn't teach you much about how to fine-tune your script to do exactly what you want it to do.

For my table creation and exploration with MySQL, I used a program that came installed on my server called PHPmyAdmin. You still need to know the basics of MySQL syntax language to use it, but it's infinitely easier than typing the commands in a DOS prompt. It puts the table into a browser format where you can click around and edit exactly what you want, but if you don't know your data types and stuff then your script is never going to work.

I could talk about this forever. Computer programming is one of my favorite things to do, but I just never have anything to program, and I'm not experienced enough to work on something as complicated as Cantr. I've tried to figure out some of the things that go on behind-the-scenes, and the map thing is something that confuses me to no end. But, something simpler, like a crappy discussion forum (not nearly as high-end as these ones) is pretty easy to create.

EDIT: To answer Seko's post, PHP is the most widely used programming language for web based stuff. If you just do a Google search for something along the lines of "php beginner's tutorial", it'll teach you all the basics. Tweak your search a bit and you can find cooler stuff like how to combine it with MySQL for database management.

So there isn't really anything that gives you pretty tables and such to move around? Can't you create forms that link to a web server and have it store the information into a database? Isn't that sort of what online forms do?

I tried to make a user request form to go on our website awhile back and I thought I had tied it to an Access database. We never really implemented it (sending a message in Outlook worked just as well) but I was hoping it would be something simple like that.

I know that a lot of company databases work through SQL (we have two different ones at our office that use it). How did those people make their stuff? And how do those genius people remember all that coding verbiage? It just reads as garbley-gook to me.

Okay, then, how do you create a simple message board like the one we use here? It's something we throw around in our office from time to time. Is there some simple software--with tables to be seen and such--that I could try out?

A forum as cool as this one would be hard for someone like me to make, and really frustrating for a beginning coder.

I don't know if there's a program out there that will take the specs you give it and crank it into a PHP/MySQL message board. But if you're talking about creating one from scratch, you'll need to read up on both PHP and MySQL, since they would go hand-in-hand with the development of your forum.

There are programs that you can have installed on your server that would make navigating your tables a heck of a lot easier. Depending on your server, you might even be able to just cook up a phpbb forum just like this one simply by filling out a form. The server I use does it, and it's really simple. No coding experience required.

Cantr is mostly written in PHP and MySQL, so yes you do have to do a lot of code writing in editors that don't look much better than Notepad, though they can distinguish code words from variables, help recognising spelling mistakes or missing brackets, that kind of thing.

I personally used to access databases using a Microsoft Access database connected using Visual Basic's Data object, but then I picked up MySQL for Cantr programming and I find it much easier to use and much more efficient, too, because you can pick data more specifically. Microsoft Access allows you to use MySQL to manipulate its databases, too, so I'm currently rewriting my programs to use MySQL rather than that stupid Data object.

If anybody's interested, I can give a quick & dirty intro to common MySQL commands.