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whitmar57
Joined: Mar 27, 2004
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 2004-Oct-20 06:36
My dilemma:
I hired a programmer (let's call him Sir Jerkface) to help me out with my little website. It's not a great, divine website out to change the planet or save lives... just my own little venture into the website world. I hired Sir Shithead because I needed a programmer to create some database forms for my site. He had written programs for my brother's website and told me that since my database needs were similar, albeit on a much smaller scale, that my job would be a piece of cake and agreed to the contract for my site's work.
He began the job and it seems almost completed it... and then was apparently abducted by aliens as I have not been able to reach him for over 8 months now. But thank goodness he did not get whisked away to his home planet before he completely screwed up my site!!! (the images are all moved around onto text, I can't fix it in FrontPage because it won't load and that's all I have to use)
I am not a developer, a programmer etc etc I can get by with the bare basics and depend strongly on the "WYSIWYG" kind of computing. I just wanted my little website to be part of the www. Now I'm stuck with no idea of where to begin to fix this problem.
I don't even know the technical terms to use so that I can communicate what it is I need .... so I'm not sure how to look for a solution.... argghh!! sigh!
If you'll permit, I'll try my best to explain what kind of form(s) I need to work on my website...
The best analogy I can muster is that it would be similar to a real estate form.
An owner submits her home to the website via a form. She checks off the features that her home has along with a price, location, maybe a snappy selling title.
A buyer comes along and via a different form checks off all the features he is looking for in a potential property along with price, location, then hits the submit button at the bottom of the form and is brought to the results page(s) to view all the properties that match his inputted criteria.
That is what I need. Although my site isn't a real estate site, from what I can figure it is VERY comparable in the forms that are used.
The businesses I am indexing into a searchable directory have many different features. Not all of these businesses have the same features. And just like not all houses have swimming pools and fire places, I want my users to be able to tick (check) off the features they are looking for and end up with a results page that only displays businesses with those said features.
And that is my dilemma! I have no clue what this type of programming is called or what the database is called... I'm worried that I'm going to get ripped off or strung along and charged for hours and hours of work that may already be done (who knows, Sir Jerkface may have almost finished the dam thing).
Could you, kind forum people please help me figure out what to ask for or who to ask?? I'm not sure what else to do.
Any assistance would be life-saver
Whitmar
[ Message was edited by: whitmar57 10/20/2004 12:05 am ]
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Sinoed
Joined: Dec 11, 2000
# Posts: 5266
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Posted: 2004-Oct-20 22:46
All you really need is the ability to search your website if you want to go really simple. You don't need a fancy database of any kind, and programming a search facility shouldn't be too difficult. Theoretically, the 'records' that are created by people listing homes could even be static pages (ie. ones that you publish from frontpage yourself). You could implement a search facility (like Google) on your site to search those pages if you wanted, thus avoiding a database.
Now, having a database might make your job a little easier if you had some other things that you wanted to do with it. Say for example if you wanted listings that were older than 2 years to be automatically deleted. To do what you need right now this is what you need:
1) A webform filled out by prospective buyers and sellers that when submitted is added to the database.
2) The ability to search through those records and properly display them based on certain criteria (ie. waterfront vs. city properties) to a site visitor.
Ideally, you also need the ability to delete/modify those records before they are published 'live'.
IMO, its readily apparent that after 8 months your programmer is long gone and isn't going to be back anytime soon. There are probably quite a few 'boxed' solutions that would work for you since you don't need anything complex. If you look at sites like www.hotscripts.com you can search through the packages offered under 'Content Management' - most of them will do what you need. Hire another programmer or local tech geek to install it for you (maybe a couple of hours) and find a webmaster to take a look at your pages. I can't really comment on what the programmer did to them, other than thinking he tried to start converting them to another format (which is why they don't open anymore). Best of luck. 
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whitmar57
Joined: Mar 27, 2004
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 2004-Oct-21 06:26
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my post and offer excellent advice!
Most of what I am finding is Form Mail... which is not what I need. I do not want the data collected to be emailed anywhere.
Could you be more specific as to what type of form I need to hunt down? Would it be a CGI script? Do I need a seperate form processor?
When the form is filled with data by one user I need for that data to be retrievable by other users via a seperate search form.
Still a bit frustrated... but I'l eventually win lol
[ Message was edited by: whitmar57 10/21/2004 12:38 am ]
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gal
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 1148
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Posted: 2004-Oct-21 14:57
http://php.resourceindex.com/Complete_Scripts/Classified_Ads/Real_Estate/
Try this link. If you find something that will work for you, you may need some help installing it. But, you could have everything off the self instead of hiring another great programmer.
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Sinoed
Joined: Dec 11, 2000
# Posts: 5266
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Posted: 2004-Oct-21 16:04
No problem. Form mail usually emails the data to you - or whatever address you specify. You could use it if you wanted to make some regular HTML pages and then just use Google or whatever to search your site. There isn't going to be a particular 'type' of form that you'll need to be looking at. The 'kind' of form processor is going to depend on the language you use for your site. A 'cgi' form uses perl scripts.
To be a little clearer, if you want to use a webform, the 'form' is a simple page that you create in HTML with the appropriate boxes. The boxes are used to collect data from your user. The script that you'll need is a 'form processor' which takes the information from your boxes and puts it into some useable form. In the case of formmail (which is a script processor), it takes the information collected from the form and mails it to someone.
Like I said, depending on how you decide to tackle this you can either use a 'boxed' solution to implement all of this including a search, or create pages yourself and use something like Google to search your site. Google does offer a search apparatus that will specifically search only pages on your site. Take a look at that link that Gal has provided, you might find something useful there.
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whitmar57
Joined: Mar 27, 2004
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 2004-Oct-21 18:54
Thank you so much Sinoed, for your explanation and time taken to help me out here.
And gal...that link has brought me closer to finding my script than ever b4...ty ty ty so much.
Whitmar
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