Need Help with PHP Program for Church

[WelchTC]

For all those who know how to program in PHP and MySQL, I need your help. I need a special program written that would be used by us at the Church in conjunction with this technology Web site. If you would like to help, please download and read the following project specifications. I would love to have any feedback from people. Even if you don't have the time or skill set to help, please let me know what you think.

[mkmurray]

Hey Tom W.,

This seems like a project right up my alley. I would love to help with something like this. I was the Head TA for CS 142 where I wrote a few PHP scripts that would talk to a MySQL DB for various things like a dynamic schedule displayed to the students that would be updated daily by the professor. We also wrote scripts to handle submissions of class work throught the site.

At work I deal with workflows everyday now. Our Systems Architect is a genious and we've really worked out a great architecture for doing workflows for fulfillment of all of our products, http://www.ancestrystore.com/ and http://www.ournameinhistory.com/. We wrote workflows to track the orders through the fulfillment process, either in house or to a drop shipper (although, our system would be a tad overkill for your needs). We work mostly with Microsoft products and technologies where I work, but he has written an open source library that contains a workflow engine (http://www.codeplex.com/Pegasus; however, this is all .NET so I'll have to see if he has the workflow stuff in his Java library somewhere). You basically design a set of classes that are states in the state machine.

Well, anyway, I'd love to help and perhaps I can provide you with some of our good and bad experiences.

[WelchTC]

I'd love to have your help. Once we get a list of those willing to help, maybe the best way to start is to have an "online" meeting via IM chat groups. We can divide the work and responsibility. I'll get a subversion repository set up also.

Tom

[nbflint]

I'm wondering why you would continue to use the temporary database? Why wouldn't you have the form add the question straight into the application database and kick off the original e-mail to the church employee? This would eliminate a step or two involving the import of the XML/temporary DB data.

Also, since tech.lds.org is based on Joomla would this be built as a Joomla module in order to take advantage of the Joomla user system? (Though of course, it wouldn't be released to the Joomla community.)

[mkmurray]

By the way, I found out that our systems architect hasn't kept up his library in Java for a while. The good stuff is all in the .NET library at CodePlex.

However, I still think my knowledge of theworkflow engine and the tables used for history and current status of workflows could be helpful.

[WelchTC]

I'm wondering why you would continue to use the temporary database? Why wouldn't you have the form add the question straight into the application database and kick off the original e-mail to the church employee? This would eliminate a step or two involving the import of the XML/temporary DB data.

I'm using a joomla module now to create the forms. This module stores the form records in a DB. I'd have to heavily mod the current forms joomla module to do what you want which would mean that any new mods from the upstream of the forms package would need to be individually patched by me. This seemed to be the "cleanest". Also I thought I would get more support from this community by not introducing a huge codebase like Joomla.

Tom

[jmaxwilson]

Tom,

I program in PHP5 all day long for my job and, although i don't have a lot of extra time, I would like to contribute as my time permits. If I can be given access to the SVN repository and be included in the conversations surrounding the project, I would be happy to help out as I am able.

Are you planning to use PHP4 or PHP5?
Are you interested in leveraging some kind of PHP web application framework, like Symphony, CakePHP, or Agavi?
Do you plan to use some kind of Object Relational Model or Data Access PHP class objects to abstract the database access, or are you planning for a quick and dirty solution using
the mysql_ php functions.

If you are going to use PHP5, I would recommend at least using the new PHP Data Objects (PDO) database classes instead of the older mysql_ functions.

Let me know when you will have your chat group and I will try to join in and when you have SVN set up so I can get and contribute code.

[WelchTC]

Tom,

I program in PHP5 all day long for my job and, although i don't have a lot of extra time, I would like to contribute as my time permits. If I can be given access to the SVN repository and be included in the conversations surrounding the project, I would be happy to help out as I am able.

Awesome! Thanks!

Are you planning to use PHP4 or PHP5?

PHP4 is what I was planning on. I know PHP5 has a lot of cool new features but I have some work to get it on the technology menu.

Are you interested in leveraging some kind of PHP web application framework, like Symphony, CakePHP, or Agavi?

I would like more input on this. Because of the size of the application, I thought it would almost make the solution more complex to add another layer.

Do you plan to use some kind of Object Relational Model or Data Access PHP class objects to abstract the database access, or are you planning for a quick and dirty solution using
the mysql_ php functions.

I'm open to either right now.

Tom

[nbflint]

I'm using a joomla module now to create the forms. This module stores the form records in a DB. I'd have to heavily mod the current forms joomla module to do what you want which would mean that any new mods from the upstream of the forms package would need to be individually patched by me. This seemed to be the "cleanest". Also I thought I would get more support from this community by not introducing a huge codebase like Joomla.

Tom

Thanks for taking the time on my questions. I have a lot of them and my intention is not to question your methods, rather to understand them better. I have a ton to learn and enjoy the expose from the forum. Your answer, of course makes perfect sense. I was in the mind set of creating this as an independent application where as you're looking at integrating it to the forms module already being used by joomla.

Another question, is it an option to use the database the forms module is using and thus reduce the need for the import? I hate to see your program take several steps if they aren't needed. They may be and by the time we've hashed it over we should know!

[WelchTC]

Another question, is it an option to use the database the forms module is using and thus reduce the need for the import? I hate to see your program take several steps if they aren't needed. They may be and by the time we've hashed it over we should know!

Not really because the DB structure that the forms are in is generic to all forms made with the forms package. We could create new tables in the DB to store the data but we would still need to do the input so we would not save anything.

Tom