Movie Database Project

[zourtney]

Sometimes I wish I had Microsoft Access. I know, it's gross, but sometimes you need a simple database without the hassle of writing a whole GUI, backend, etc, etc. I want to make a simple database which tracks what movies. All I need to store is:

• Movie name
• Who is it loaned out to (if anyone)
• Who is it borrowed from (if anyone)

Simple! My brain does this automatically but has crap for accuracy. :-/

[Brad]

Have tried Open Office's version of Access? It's pretty much the same thing except for free.

[Nick]

And it would be super easy to make a web based one. Then you could check it from the store on your phone and never buy duplicate movies again!

[zourtney]

I forgot all about Open Office! Yeah, that would probably work good enough. Although Nick's suggestion, a web based one is probably a better idea since I've got the internets in my pocket. I could probably hack that out in a day with a few PHP pages.

[zourtney]

I still want this...I wonder if there are any good solutions out there? We could always use the amazing powers of Drupal. ....Hmmmm, that might actually work! I just now thought of that.

[Nick]

I would be cool making a drupal one. Might even be able to duct tape a few modules together to create one. But making one from scratch is just as alluring. A little ajax and some php, it would be easy. Just the drupal part would make it a challenge (as I don't know how to do any of that as of yet)

[zourtney]

Well, I know that the only thing worse than beating on a dead horse is betting on one¹, but I still would kind of like this project to exist. We might be able to link it together using Drupal taxonomy and a highly simplified interface.

I was browsing for tunes on the MagiPhone^[2,3] the other day and wanted to jot down a band name. Now, I have this spreadsheet saved under Google Docs with about 250 bands I might some day bother listening too. But it takes a long time to render the page, even with 20 rows per page. I know, life is rough, huh?

Anyway, I might play with this some time if no one else is interested anymore. My case, the music/bands scraplist is rather different from the "what movies do I have" database. But also not. If we use Drupal, we can make different content types easily enough and theme through through the same interface, if desired.

Too much information; I probably bored off any potential bites.

[Nick]

I think a dedicated little set of scripts would be better. More portable anyway. It would be nice to make it integrate nicely into the drupal pages though. Making it all with drupal nodes sounds.... so..... bloated I guess. But doable. Just a simplish php mysql app with perhaps a little Ajax for usability.

[zourtney]

Yeah, agree about the bloat. It would make it less portable and less redistributable. But my question is: do we care? There may or may not be any noticable performance advantage to making our own back end. It's just that I'm not real interested in writing a yet another content management system and all the required administrative pages that are needed. As simple as it may be.

Just stoking the fire What do you think?

[Nick]

If we can make our own custom add pages and customize the output/display of everything then drupal will be an OK platform to build on. If its going to be a hassle to create all the different entries, and if its going to force then to be entered one at a time (we could change that with lots of annoying scripting but that would be, well, annoying.)

[zourtney]

Yeah. We'd need a custom interface. It'll be a huge pain either way.