Digital Workshop

A couple of years ago I used Opus to create a a Family History CD-ROM. It was always my intention to try to replicate this as an Opus Web Publication. I finally got round to this a week or so ago and have just completed it.

The publication was written using Opus Pro 6. I used a free PHP editor called tsWebEditor to write the files for the Post Web Data functions. The original CD-ROM used an Access DB and I used a free utility from Bullzip to convert it to MySQL. Irfanview was used to manipulate the photographs.

I am quite pleased with it. However, I will probably do things differently next time I create an online pub using a database! Using external programmes alongside Opus introduces a whole load of other things that can go wrong. Next time I will be much more methodical and consistent particularly with things like naming conventions for variables, database fields, PHP variables and so on.

Views and (constructive ) criticism welcome. Happy to share my experiences with other users.

http://oorfolks.net

David

Your work is exceptional.

Your layout is very functional. modern and attractive and user friendly.

I would think your family would be very pleased with the enduring family album you have put together.

I'm not sure how you employed php and sql to create your publication and would be pleased to learn more about the construction of it.

Congratulations on a project well done!

Graham

Hi Graham,

Thanks for the kind words.

I have attached the Opus file and resources. Within the resources there is another folder called "PHP Files" and this contains the 2 files used in the publication. I have put some brief notes in them to explain how they work. Basically the Post Web Data passes information from Opus via variable(s) to an online script (in this case one of the 2 PHP files). The script can then use this information to do a variety of things - like connect to an online database. Information is then passed back via the same Post Web Data function in the form of a variable or an array if there is more than one piece of information. The Post Web Data then extracts the information and puts it into variables for Opus to work with. There is an excellent explanation of Post Web data in the Opus Help files.

The MySQL database was converted from the original Access Database using a tool which creates a MySQL dump. It is then just a case of copying this dump (it's just text) and then using PHPMyAdmin, simply paste the text into a MySQL query and the database is created. PHPMyAdmin is a tool which is usually provided by your web hosts and is used to to handle the administration of a MySQL database via a web browser.

David,

a great showcase example. Very nice layout of the album.

Thanks for sharing the publication setup.