phpCDs :: Help :: About Using the Site | About the Site | Contact Browsing Tips and Tricks Selecting Artist or Album in the bottom frame will return the full resultset of that category. You can select from choices presented for more detailed information. Selecting one of the options from pulldown in the bottom frame will return all relevant results. These pulldowns are dynamically generated from values in the database. You can search the database by ALL, ID, Artist, Album, Genre or Label which will return a list of all relevant items. See Advanced Site Features on how and when to use wildcards. Basic Site Features When you search by category, then the value will link to google.com and other category values will link back to the phpCDs website to aid in finding relevant results. Example: Search for Metallica by Artist, then Metallica will link to google.com which will appear in the top frame allowing you to continue browsing the CD collection. Search for Master of Puppets by Album, then by clicking Metallica you will get all albums by that band. Advanced Site Features The Search window requires explicit use of Wildcards. Use % when you're not sure of the exact phrase. Images: the images are named according to the record number, i.e. icon123.jpg Shopping Cart and Checkout When browsing you can select items for the shopping cart. When you are ready you can proceed to the Checkout section where you'll provide your contact information. This page uses a basic form handler written in PERL to send an email to site administrator and an autoreply to the sender. Database Adminstration This part of the site is password protected and uses the .htaccess feature of Apache. Inserting records All data comes from the Album information on Amazon.com. The record numbers are incremented using the automatic feature of MySQL. When the record is initially inserted, a default cover image is used. See below for adding images. Updating, Deleting records The search form on the main update page returns its results in an editable format. You can use the update page to upload images to the /phpCDs/covers sub-directory automatically.