Creating Free vs Full Registration tables

[sergeidave]

Hi guys,

 

I'm very new on both, here at the forum and new using mysql/php.

I'm working on a website and I have a question about creating the users/members table.

You know that many (if not most) websites offer both, free registration and full registration (fee subscription). What is the most common/efficient way to handle this dual-option registration process? Is it just one big table with a "Membership_type" column to differentiate?

Or should this be stored in two different tables (one for free registrations with the basic username-password-email stuff and another for paid membership with more fields like name, lastname, address, city, zip, phone, etc.)?

Thanks for your help!!

 

[trq]

Is it just one big table with a "Membership_type" column to differentiate?

 

Yeah, this would be the best approach.

[sergeidave]

If both types of registrations in a single table then only username password and email would be "not null" and the rest of the fields "null", right? But how about a scenario like this:

Some guys registeres for free and after a couple months decides to go full membership. At the time of full registration I would like to have the rest of the fields complete (name, last, address, phone, etc.). How can I make the database accept a full registration only if ALL of the remaining fields contain valid data?

[trq]

I would store user details in a seperate table all together, you can then use the users 'id' to relate these two tables of data together.