This is my first post on these forums. I have been reading Sitepoint’s ‘PHP & MySQL Novice to Ninja’ by Kevin Yank (5th Ed, May 2012) and now I am trying to put it into practice. I want to build a website for displaying news photographs to a restricted audience of media professionals, who will hopefully go on to pay me for publishing my pictures. Initially I am trying to create a registration page that will collect information from my visitors (first name, last name, job title, organisation, country, landline, cellphone, email address, hashed password), and then a login page for members who have registered. Members will obviously need to be able to edit their entries if details subsequently change.
I have studied Kevin Yank’s example of the joke database that he creates in the book, but it doesn’t seem directly transferable to the kind of database I need to build, unless I am simply not understanding it correctly.
In terms of structuring the database and best practice, should I have 9 separate tables for each element of information that I am collecting and link for each individual using look-up tables, as Kevin does for his joke database? Alternatively would it be better to have just one table with 9 columns for each member?
Many thanks in anticipation of any answers to that question, and general advice about the way I’m starting out or experiences of Kevin’s manual.