[hooloovoo33]

I have recently been starting a new site, and on this site there is going to be a form where the user submits information about interests, and location, and other details. What i would like to do, is to be able to submit this info to database, and then automatically search that database, and come up with other users that have similar interests and such, perhaps rating it by a relevancy. I have seen this before in more than one place, but i have no idea how to go about creating it. Any help would be much appreciated.

-Zac A.

[Catalyst]

Do you plan on having them pick interests from a list or just type them in?

[Ben Abrams]

Catalyst, on Apr 16 2007, 05:18 AM, said:

Do you plan on having them pick interests from a list or just type them in?

yes i was thinking this, depending on how you choose to make it, it will dramatically affect its complexity

[Man2u2uk]

Are you thinking of using their profile data to do this?

For example when a new member signs up to the forum you normally have to enter that data anyway.

apart from interests, which are normally optional, but you could make it a required part.

[hooloovoo33]

Hey everyone, thanks for the replys-

I was thinking that i would have them type them in, but if that makes it that much harder to make work, then perhaps radio buttons and a list. I have found a good program for creating forms, and submiting the info to a mysql database. I was wondering if anyone knew of a similar thing to manipulate the stored info.

Thanks again-

Zac A.

[Ben Abrams]

hooloovoo33, on Apr 16 2007, 12:44 PM, said:

Hey everyone, thanks for the replys-

I was thinking that i would have them type them in, but if that makes it that much harder to make work, then perhaps radio buttons and a list. I have found a good program for creating forms, and submiting the info to a mysql database. I was wondering if anyone knew of a similar thing to manipulate the stored info.

Thanks again-

Zac A.

i Think before we go any further we need to ask of your programing experience. Not that we wont help you if your a beginner, quite the opposite, but we need to know where you are up to in your knowledge to help you progress and develop this solution.

[Catalyst]

If you're open to the fixed list idea then that's the way I'd go, much easier. And you can add a way for people to suggest additions for the list. You'd then have your 3 database tables, users, interests, and a user-to-interest table that you'd search for your matches.

[hooloovoo33]

My programing experience is pretty much nill. I understand a lot about computers and such, but i learn by doing. For instance, in the actual creation of my site, I'm not very good at writing Html, and CSS, I can read it and understand it, but im not very good at writing. So to make the site, what i did was look around at different web pages and found features that I wanted, and then looked in the source to see how they did it. I just keep revising the code, until it looks how i want. So in other words, i really don't know how to program, but I am quite willing to learn. I just have no idea where to start in programming this kinda thing, or even what it requires beyond a database and forms.

Thanks,

-Zac A.

[Ben Abrams]

hooloovoo33, on Apr 17 2007, 02:00 AM, said:

I just have no idea where to start in programming this kinda thing, or even what it requires beyond a database and forms.

Not a problem zak, ill outline some of the areas you need to look up on =)

Firstly, were going to be submitting information to a server side script, either PHP or ASP(.net)

Create a topic in the web development forum and ask about how to post details to a php script.

Next we would look at how to use this php script to insert these records in a database, so another topic there one you know how to use your preferedserver side language to do this.

In this script, we would do a select query - to match up against similar interests (say they are in a comma separated string, they can be turned into 'tags' perhaps in some serialized array, but more on this in another post) then display the results.

Its not a *complex* thing to make, you just need to know the basics first, as im sure this project may be quite daunting for you.

I suggest making a thread in the web development forum and asking some of these series of questions there. Do one at at a time, so when you know the answer to the first, you can apply that knowledge to the second.

[Karl Buckland]

It's probably best to remember that even a complex system can be easily constructed from small parts, where each small part is trivial.

[hooloovoo33]

Allrighty

thanks guys, I think i figured out how to submit the info to a data base, via a form generator thing. I guess i need to go learn some SQL.

Thanks again for the help

-Zac A.