tl;dr version: I did some clever programming for managing events and ticket purchasing easy! And decided to add this same capability to my database system that hasn’t been worked on in a long time!

Long version:

As a result to the demand of making a particular website, I’ve come to realize that I need to rethink my CSV-like Online PHP database a bit (Rudimentary Ample Writing Range, or RAWR).

For those who have missed my RAWR system post, it was a plan to make a simple CSV-like database designed for making/managing events and their RSVPs. It’s completely PHP-based, using PHP’s file functions (PHP 4, since the server of the event planning company I work for only runs that version). I haven’t really gotten that far because of other workload.

Anyway, the website I’m currently making demanded to be extremely user-friendly for the guy who wants to edit the website but has no knowledge whatsoever about making websites. The News page’s editor is very similar to that of a blog’s editor (except without comments, replies, tags, etc) with text formatting that is extremely similar to a PHPBB forums site (like [b][/b] tags), and I’ve applied the same sort of system for the rest of the pages; just a couple of changes in names and whatnot.

But the parts that got me to rethink my RAWR system are the Events and Tickets pages. When I finished applying my editor to two pages, I planned to do the Events and Tickets pages next, and wondered what I should do to make it user-friendly. As I was writing down the attributes/properties/whatever of what the Events needed in the scratch paper that was in front of me, I noticed that the Tickets page required almost the same stuff as Events, so much that I wouldn’t need a separate file containing the info!

So, with a very neat trick, I managed to make editing Events affect both the Events and the Tickets pages. Upcoming events with a buy code (like from Paypal or Google Checkout) would show up in the Tickets pages. Past/expired events or events without a buy code wouldn’t show their respective tickets in the Tickets page. Entire system took about a total of 6 hours to work perfectly.

As to how this relates to the RAWR system, I decided to add this nifty system to my RAWR plans. Also made me rethink of how simple the RAWR should be (on the user side). I didn’t really think about how editing events should be handled, and I now see that it can be a huge problem when it comes to editing, uh, auxiliary fields. Good thing I didn’t go too far into it. Another thing, it made me rethink of how I should structure the code, as well. The structure I did for the editors for the particular website worked really well.

Rawr.