01-10-2006, 11:35 AM
This is driving me nuts...
A relative has a collection of several hundred toy tractors (this stuff is serious business nowadays), and wants to put together a catalog or database of everything. Naturally, I opened my big yap and suggested the best way to do that would be with an online catalog. I figured it would be simple enough to knock together something with PHP and MySQL using the catalog part of an open source online store. Since he wouldn't be actually selling anything, I could just disable the parts he doesn't need.
I've installed PHPcommerce (one of Dreamhost's one-click installs), but it's giving me fits -- every time I change ANYTHING, even just the default text, it breaks. (I'll probably take that up with DH at some point -- either I'm being really stupid or there's a permissions problem.) Ugly MySQL errors everywhere. And it's an ugly rat's nest with includes inside of includes inside of includes and totally uncommented files scattered all over the place.
Anyone got any better ideas for an open source or cheap solution to this problem?
I've found desktop software for cataloging collections, but that's not acceptable because it leaves you vulnerable to losing all the data if the computer goes blooey. Part of the reason for the catalog is insurance, and if a disaster takes out the collection, it's going to also fry the computer in the next room.
A relative has a collection of several hundred toy tractors (this stuff is serious business nowadays), and wants to put together a catalog or database of everything. Naturally, I opened my big yap and suggested the best way to do that would be with an online catalog. I figured it would be simple enough to knock together something with PHP and MySQL using the catalog part of an open source online store. Since he wouldn't be actually selling anything, I could just disable the parts he doesn't need.
I've installed PHPcommerce (one of Dreamhost's one-click installs), but it's giving me fits -- every time I change ANYTHING, even just the default text, it breaks. (I'll probably take that up with DH at some point -- either I'm being really stupid or there's a permissions problem.) Ugly MySQL errors everywhere. And it's an ugly rat's nest with includes inside of includes inside of includes and totally uncommented files scattered all over the place.
Anyone got any better ideas for an open source or cheap solution to this problem?
I've found desktop software for cataloging collections, but that's not acceptable because it leaves you vulnerable to losing all the data if the computer goes blooey. Part of the reason for the catalog is insurance, and if a disaster takes out the collection, it's going to also fry the computer in the next room.