movie database

[toxictoad]

Hey all, I've got a few general questions I'd like to get some feed back on...I'm very new to php/mysql so any advice would be cool 

 

I've modified this php/mysql for my movie collection (http://phatjoints.com/films/filmdb/index3.php) and the next step is to have a link from each title to a new page (similar to imdb). The linking part is find as that's built in I just need to specify the URL but I'm unsure of the best way to develop the main page?

 

I'm going to want the same info that's on the results page and also, the plot, and an flv trailer.

- I could do each page in HTML/CSS, which is something I wouldn't need help with, or I could use php to pull all the info from the DB, but would probably need a lot of help from you guys 

 

So I guess the question is, just for this part, is it worth using php instead of an HTML/CSS template?

 

In addition to that I would like 'Related Titles' to be shown at the bottom of the page in a similar way to the main results. I guess this is where it gets really difficult and not possible due to some limitations I don't yet know about.

 

E.g. If 2 or more movies have 3 matches out of 4 (rating/director/country/year) then those titles will be displayed. I'm guessing this will be the SQL part?

 

- There is only one table in this database so hopefully that wont cause a problem? But I understand it's probably not optimum.

 

- It's only for personal use so not many visitors etc and it'll only ever hold a couple of thousands records and the very most

 

- How does the IMDB search work and would it be to complicated to configure my search so that 'similar matches' are returned? at the moment if the word is misspelled it doesn't return anything

 

I've seen on a few sites the use of stars (images) for ratings, are these scripts available for free to add into sites or is it fairly easy to convert 1-5 from the DB info images on the webpage?

 

Thanks

[JD*]

I'll try to answer your questions in order:

 

It's fairly easy to make a link to each page and then have one other page (or the same page) that can read a URL variable and pull the appropriate data from the database. You can even combine a mod_rewrite rule to hide the actual URL variable and make it look nice (but save that until later).

 

As for your "related titles"...never done anything like it, but I'd imagine you'd want to do a query along the lines of

 

SELECT * FROM movies where rating = (this_movies_rating) OR director = (this_movies_director)...

 

etc, where you'll replace the stuff in () with the actual movie information (dynamically).

 

As for the star rating, yes, there are easy scripts out thre for ajax start rating systems, or making a regular one, which isn't very hard.